Motels

by Catherine Texier

June 28, 2006

The motels look all the same, although they belong to different chains: Lucky 7. Super 8. International Motel. Econolodge. They are located in strip malls, right off the highway, sometimes tucked away in a cluster of other motels and restaurants. Yuri has me pull up to the side and park my car at the bedroom door incognito while he goes to reception. Is he hiding me because he has rented a room for one person only? Or because, being illegal, he wants to avoid any suspicious behavior? In case the clerk mistook me for a hooker? The idea gives me a cheap thrill. I love the motels for their anonymity. To me they are the true symbols of American freedom. I want them to be as plain and nondescript, as characterless as possible. I want a certain feeling of seediness. A certain shade of neglect. I disappear more to myself that way. I don't tell Yuri about those fantasies. He would find them perverse, attributing them to my decadent Western upbringing. He, on the other hand, holds these rooms to certain standards. He likes some better than others. He finds some cleaner, others dirtier, although to my eyes they seem interchangeable. He frets about the dust, runs a finger on the dresser like a fussy housewife, picks up my bra and my underwear off the floor, checks the towels in the bathroom, makes sure the glasses have been properly wrapped in paper. Meanwhile, I lay on the bed, studying the intricate pattern of the bedspread, analyzing the various shades of green of the wallpaper, marveling at the muddiness of the colors, at their aggressive dullness, waiting for him to finish his inspection and spread my legs open.

When he comes back he throws me on the bed, lifts my tank top, pulls my breasts out of my bra, looks at them and steps back. "Stay like this." His voice breathless. "Don't move." He disappears outside and I wait for him, immobile, remaining the way he has arranged me, a cloth doll again, my legs dangling from the bed, my arms thrown around my head, my denim jacket wide open to my bulging breasts, until he comes back in, brings me to my feet and takes me to his van. After a few miles he pulls into the semi-deserted parking lot of a shopping mall. We climb over the seats and let ourselves drop at the back. He pulls the curtains closed.
    "I wanted to do this," he says, "in the van."
    Yuri and I are lying in the gray Dodge in the early evening. A reddish light filters around the drawn curtains of the windows. I kneel to pull aside one of the curtains and look out. There's a small strip of stores, some already closed but all lit up with neon signs, a supermarket, a check-cashing place, a pizzeria, and an Arby's electric sign hanging from a tall post wishing GOOD MORNING and advertising a breakfast of blueberry pancakes and the name of preacher coming on Sunday — tomorrow. An ordinary strip-mall, the kind I find profoundly depressing. But with Yuri, it becomes exotic. The sense of dislocation and freedom is so intense that a surge of wild energy runs through me, making me faint.
    "Let's sleep here," I whisper. "We could leave tomorrow morning and go for a ride. We could just go back to the motel later for my car. Don't you sleep in your van sometimes?"
    He finds me funny, you funny girl, but I see from his face that he doesn't like the idea, that in his mind the van is not made to sleep in but to carry his merchandise. Besides, he has other plans. Dinner, for instance. He's starved.

In the morning, he turns on VH1 full blast and drags the sheet and blanket on the floor as he has done since the first time in Brighton Beach. He hates to have sex on beds, beds are boring.

He has a satisfied smile, as if he's been administering shock therapy and the results have exceeded his expectations.

Ricky Martin's "La Vida Loca" is pumping into our ears with the same frantic rhythm Yuri's going at me. Her lips are devil red and her skin's the color mocha/ she will wear you out livin la vida loca, Come on! Again, I feel something give inside of me under Yuri's assault. "You're letting yourself go, is good." He has a satisfied smile, as though he has been administering shock therapy and the results have exceeded his expectations.
    Afterwards he goes to fill his thermos with coffee at the reception and comes back with a bag of muffins, also courtesy of the motel. After our breakfast, he opens the door, gestures toward the trees lining the parking lot and points to a branch at the end of which flowers seemed to be blooming.
    "My babies."
    I put my glasses on and step out, and realize that the "flowers" are the condoms we've used during the night.
    "Oh no! Ugh!"
    He laughs at my face. "I didn't want to waste sperm. Sperm is good. Look, is dripping into soil."
    "Not funny. You're just showing off. Please, get them out of there and throw them out!"
    "Okay, okay, I will."
    I disappear into the room to pack my bag, laughing at his provocative schoolboy humor, but vaguely alarmed at his need to advertise our affair so crudely while I go to such lengths to keep it secret.
    When I pull away, I see him in my rear-view mirror, standing by his van, waving goodbye to me, looking lonely and sad. Behind him, the condoms are still hanging from the tree. From a distance they look like pale, translucent flowers, or jellyfish hung dry after a tidal wave.
He enters me without warning, while I stand at the window. I still have my coat and boots on. He pops open the buttons of my coat and pulls up my sweater and my bra, then pulls down my pants and hits the small of my back with a sharp little tap to make me bend lower and assure the best angle for penetration.
On the windowpane I see the reflection of my breasts dipping into his hands like pale moons, and a giant shadow toiling over me.
    "Enough," I say after a while, and we drop to the ground, both in our coats and shoes, with only that strip of flesh between our waists and knees exposed, more ravishingly naked for being surrounded by layers of clothes, and we start again, him going at me in long, hammering moves until I cry out and he shoves his hand against my mouth to smother my scream and he collapses on my stomach, his weight crushing me.
    Out of breath, we sit up and lean against each other. His left arm curls around me. He's popped a cassette in his tapeplayer. A woman singer. Deep, wrenching voice. He pours vodka out of a plastic bottle into two glasses and drinks a shot. I don't touch mine. With his right hand he lights up a Parliament and softly blows out the smoke.
    "I am illegal, I told you that?"
    "Yes."
    Another pull on his cigarette.
    "I told you about Russian woman right? The one I am going to marry?" He glances at me sideways. "I move in with her. We went to pick furniture together. We found apartment in New Jersey." He turns toward me. "Is for INS, you understand. But is not about sex. Maybe she wants me, sometimes I think, the way she looks at me, I don't know. But I don't want her."

He drops his arm from my shoulders and puts out his cigarette. "I got into sex before I had a chance to fall in love."

"I know, I know. I got my papers that way too."
    "You got married for papers?" He looks incredulous.
    "Well . . . not exactly. That's how I got my green card. But we were in love."
    He snickers and pours himself another shot of vodka and downs it, head tilted back.
    "I have only loved one woman in my life. My mother." Tragic voice, as though the word itself, "mother," carried its own dose of tragedy, regardless of the actual circumstances.
    I move a little from him to disengage myself from his arm. "I know. You told me. You don't know what love is yet."
    He drops his arm from my shoulders and puts out his cigarette. "I got into sex before I had a chance to fall in love."
    The sadness in his voice doesn't feel faked. He wraps his arms around me again and I rest my head against his shoulder. With a pang, I think that for me, too, sex started before love.

The syrupy-screeching sounds of violins wake me up later. We're in bed now. I open my eyes to the blurry vision of a tall, blond woman wearing a flowery, half-opened négligee and blood-red nails lying on a fur rug and sticking two fingers in the opening of her panties. A porno tape. Without my glasses, everything looks like an Impressionist painting. Squinting hard I manage to make out images of priapic cocks entering moist cunts, fading out into exotic flowers opening and closing their petals. With its soft-focus shots the porn video makes me think of his psychedelic Pink Floyd tape only with worse music. Yuri mumbles something that I don't get. I drift in and out of sleep, hypnotized by the complicated pattern of fade-ins and fade-outs.
    "What?"
    "I shouldn't watch that crap." He abruptly clicks off the remote. "It's sick." He slips his hand between my legs, teases me for a moment with his fingers, then whispers,"I want to suck your cunt. Go wash yourself," in his taskmaster's voice.
    I sit up, fully awake.
    "Huh?"
    "I want you clean."
    What now? Is it another one of his obsessions? Like taking three showers a day and picking up any piece of clothing that's fallen on the floor with an air of disgust as if it were contaminated?
    "I took a shower in the morning."
    He nudges me with his elbow.
    "Don't argue. Do it."
    It's the tone of his voice that turns me on. As though the humiliation, to be sent back to the bathroom to wash up like a child who came to the table with dirty hands, was in itself exciting. Ashamed by my docility, I stumble in the dark toward the bathroom and wash at the sink, debating, in my half-sleep, whether his demand is sexy (worthy of a brutal, domineering cossack) or obnoxious. Isn't that obsession with cleanliness a sign of distaste for the female body — or of an obsessive-compulsive disorder? Meanwhile I busy myself splashing water over my legs until all traces of soap are washed off, pat myself dry and stumble back to the bedroom.
    "Are you clean?" Again, the callousness of his voice arises in me simultaneous flares of anger and desire. He tastes me with the tip of his tongue to make sure, then attacks me voraciously with his tongue and lips as though releasing a pent-up rage, and fires me up to a crescendo of tension so intense my body can't resist anymore and explodes in a violent orgasm that leaves me shaking from head to toe — like a guitar string so taut it starts vibrating before snapping. And I fall into a bottomless sleep.

Night. Yuri is standing naked over me.

He shrugs and takes out a toolbox of toys I've never seen. He pulls one out, a royal blue dildo.

He whips his leather belt off the waistband of his jeans. Cracks it like a riding switch.
    "No." I rise my hand in defense. "Not that."
    Reluctant, he drops the belt. "You must learn how to take pain. Like yoga. Breathe past pain." His usual refrain.
    My hand remains raised like that of a cop stopping traffic. I look into his eyes. "Only when I feel like it."
    He shrugs and takes out a toolbox of toys I've never seen. Shiny, bright plastic. He pulls one out, a royal blue dildo. A majestic, but peaceful color, blue. It's bigger than his own member, the tip tooled to represent thick recesses of skin.
    "I want to do it there," he says, fingering my anus. "Have you ever done it?"
    "Yes," I breathe, "long time ago."
    "And this," he holds the blue dildo in the light of his clip lamp like a candle, "in front at the same time, ok?"
    "Okay," I whisper.
    "Together, okay?"
    "Okay, but gently."
    He laughs his devilish laugh.
    "Of course."
    The rolled "r" in "course" doesn't bode well. But he enters me with surprising gentleness, and miraculously, there's hardly any resistance. I push past the pain like he said. I trust him when it comes to sex. He knows what he's doing. The sensation of being entirely filled, full beyond desire, is irresistible. I collapse under him in a long, delicious sigh. He, on the other hand, rolls off me and drops condom and dildo to the floor with a disgusted flip of his wrist. His mouth is pursed in a dubious arc.
    "Is okay . . . " he says, "but I don't like so much."
Lying on the bed, I watch him coming out of the shower, a small towel loosely knotted around his hips, his shoulders pink from the hot water. We are in another motel upstate somewhere, not a real place, just an exit number off the Thruway. He crosses the room and sits at the table where he contemplates a pile of bills, his left hand toiling with a calculator, then launches into a long tirade about a Russian woman he has run into the previous weekend, a "goooorgeous" woman, who he had fucked a couple of years earlier, and who had just shown up "out of the blue," then segues into how much money he's made for the weekend. He has another fair tomorrow and he is calculating how much he needs to make to pay off his credit card debt. My mind wandering, I contemplate the green arabesques of the wallpaper, which clash with the dull blue plaid pattern of the bedspread.
    "Show me how you touch yourself." He suddenly turns to me, his hands still on the calculator. "Spread your legs."
    Like a stern examiner judging a performance, he watches as I wet a finger on my tongue, then insert it inside of me.
    "Show me how you do it."
    The brutality of his orders arouses me. The vulnerability of my lower body, naked, with my shirt grazing my navel, while he sits businesslike in front of his bills, is exciting.
    "Don't stop." He watches me to make sure I don't slack off on the job. Then he comes closer and sits on the bed, opening me up with two fingers and peering between my legs.
    "I want to see your hole."
    His gaze is penetrating, dark, obsessive. It strips me down to a hole. The rest of me, legs, pubic hair, navel, breasts revealed by the shirt pulled up, one hand limply hanging above my head, the other one busy executing his orders, is reduced to simple accessory to the abyss that fascinates him. And it is that stripping down by his insolent gaze that makes my desire rush so violently between my legs.

He brings his fingers out wet, leaving me to writhe like a snake.

    I come on his hand.
    He brings his fingers out dripping wet, leaving me to writhe like a snake.
    "Stay like this," he says.
    He comes back, nonchalantly, and kneels above me, supplicant over my body, and pierces me so swiftly, so deeply, that I can only surrender — no time to build up any defenses against the assault.

He is sitting at the desk again, naked, smoking, still adding up numbers on a piece of paper, his calculator at his elbow. I pack my toilet bag in the bathroom, check that I have my cell phone, my keys, zip up my boots, sling my weekend bag over my shoulder. He lifts his head from his paper and watches me for a moment. His eyes narrow.
    "Don't get addicted to me," he warns me.
    Addicted? I don't even think about him when I am back home, until it's time to see him again. Puzzled, I look at him for a moment, then go up to him, pull the cigarette out of his mouth, take a puff off of it and stick it back between his lips.
    "How about you?"
    He stares at me, his eyebrows knitted, pinches the cigarette between his thumb and forefinger and tosses it into the wastebasket.
    "Don't worry about me." n°

©2006 Catherine Texier and hooksexup.com