The Mammoth Book of International Erotica

CUCKOO by Brian Fawcett

FERRIS CAN’T QUITE decide why the first sight of the ferry dock makes him shiver. Is it fear or expectation, or is it simply the bracing spring air? With one hand, he grips the bouquet of yellow tulips he’s carrying a little tighter, pulls his jacket closer to his neck with the other, and the shivers pass.

He doesn’t expect the island to be the same after ten years. Islands change, people change, nothing remains the same. If it has taught him nothing else, travelling across four continents has driven home the ubiquitousness of change, although too often the specific message received is twisted between “Yankee Go Home” and “Everything changes – into a mall”.

Yet from a distance, the island is at least similar, and it isn’t until the ferry closes in on the dock that the changes become visible. Vince is waiting for him at the terminal, as expected. But he’s standing beside a nearly new Volkswagen Jetta, not slouched down comfortably in the seat of a battered GMC panel. From this distance, Vince could be mistaken for an ordinary middle-aged man, his face obscured by a beard that is more grey than black. To Ferris, he’s dead easy to recognize, and anything but ordinary. Vince is Ferris’s secret life – together with Ava.

Looking at him, Ferris shivers once again. That’s the most familiar feeling of all, and it doesn’t have anything to do with the weather conditions. Ferris has seen him waiting like this fifty, a hundred times, in every conceivable kind of weather, and the shiver has always been part of it. There is uneasiness and curiosity in it, and a tingling, what now? expectancy. But ten years have changed the shiver, too. The intensities have shifted. This morning, curiosity leads.

The ferry taps the dock, recoils a little, and the ramp mechanisms drop the heavy steel plates onto the decks. Ferris hangs back as the other passengers tramp across the plates and onto the wooden dock, an anonymous surge of eager human flesh that has debarked here the same way, in the same colourful chaos ten times a day since he was last here. How many crowds is that? Ferris tries to do the calculation in his head and settles at somewhere near forty thousand.

He leans against the ferry rail and makes an inventory. The mossy cedars and firs of the bay are more sparse than he remembers, and there are fewer of them. He glimpses several plush new buildings half-hidden among them, expensive homes defined by the unmistakable ostentation of wealthy people who want solitude, comfort, and convenience at the same time. The road leading down to the ferry slip looks more congested with cars and passengers than it used to be, but the sewery-salt odour of the marina is the same, and when he peers down through its murky iridescence, he can see neither improvement nor the bottom.

Ferris knows that the changes here, whatever they turn out to be, probably won’t be for the better. Everything gets uglier and more vulgar. This island and its contents more than most places, probably. Less nature, more people, more toxins and shit. The crabs and shellfish all up the coast, he recalls, were declared unfit for eating several years ago, a combination of pulp mill dioxins and too much sewage washing through to the beaches from the new developments.

He steps onto the ramp, continuing his gloomy inventory. In the marina behind the ferry slip, the boats are bigger than they once were, more of them Fiberglas. And there are houseboats. He wonders how that happened. The islanders had once been willing to form their own navy to keep them out. Somebody has paid a lot of money for the privilege of having their living room roll around like a toy boat in a bathtub every ninety minutes when the ferries come in.

Vince catches sight of him as he reaches the end of the ramp and booms out a greeting. “Hey, hey! Cuckoo! Over here!”

Ferris almost flinches. He hasn’t heard that nickname in a long time, not since the last time Vince used it. Trust him to bring it up before anything. He looks over and sees that Vince has a wide grin on his face – and that he’s waiting for Ferris to come to him. Some things don’t change.

They shake hands and then embrace, awkwardly. Vince glances at the tulips, but doesn’t acknowledge them. “You don’t change much,” he says.

Ferris shrugs. “I’ve got a few creaks.”

“No,” Vince says, as if reading his thoughts. “You look young. Your face. And this,” he pokes at Ferris’s gut, “pretty good.”

“Well, it isn’t like I’ve had to work at it,” Ferris answers. “Good genetics, I guess.”

Vince’s face hardens momentarily. “Oh, yeah, sure. But you haven’t led a hard life. All you do is travel to glamorous places and sit on your ass. Hop in.” He gestures toward the passenger side of the Jetta.

Ferris leans through the open window and looks inside. The car is immaculate. “Nice car,” he says. “What happened to your junk heap?”

At one time Vince had four mid-fifties GMC pickup trucks in his backyard to rob for parts to keep the panel he drove running. It wasn’t that he liked working on cars, or that he was saving money. It was a gesture to his father, a master mechanic who could make or repair anything.

Vince doesn’t answer for a moment, as if he can’t quite remember. “Oh, shit,” he says, finally, “that was a long time ago. Someone hauled them all to the dump when we sold the house.”

Ferris opens the car door, tosses the bouquet into the back seat, and climbs in. When he closes the car door, it comes to with a satisfyingly soft thump. Vince clambers in, reads Ferris’s mind once again.

“The old man’s dead, you know.”

Ferris doesn’t know, but he isn’t surprised. Vince’s father had been in poor health for years, and he didn’t much like doctors or hospitals.

Ferris had been fond of Vince’s father and had got along better with him than Vince did. Ferris would have loved the old man, but that wasn’t permitted. After Ferris’s parents died, the old man had taken Ferris under his wing and offered him everything that familial love confers. He was about the only male role model Ferris ever accepted. He’d given Ferris his nickname – Cuckoo – joking that Ferris was trying to push Vince out of the nest.

“When’d he go?” Ferris asks, breaking his reverie. “How long?”

“A couple of years ago,” Vince answers after a pause. “His heart blew up on him while he was pulling the transmission on a truck. Never knew what hit him.”

“I liked your old man a lot,” Ferris says, then revises. “I loved him. I’m sorry he’s gone.”

“Yeah, me too,” Vince answers, as if it were the least important thing on his mind. “I miss him sometimes. And,” he pauses again, “sometimes I don’t. Sometimes I’m glad he’s gone. He could be a miserable old bastard when he wanted to.”

“We should have grown up to be men like him,” Ferris says.

“We didn’t.” Vince stares through the windshield for a moment, as if considering what kind of men he and Ferris had become. “That’s for sure.”

He starts the car, and they drive off the ferry slip past the line of cars waiting to load.

“How’s Ava doing?” Ferris asks.

“You know how it goes,” Vince answers, noncommittally. “Up and down. You’ll see.”

Ferris wants to ask him if Ava is still beautiful, but it occurs to him that Vince might not understand what he’s asking. There had always been a strange lack of interiority in the way Vince viewed Ava. He seemed to know that she was an attractive woman, and he admired her sexual athletics and her unpredictability – but Ferris didn’t think he ever thought of her in terms of beauty. Not the way he did. And does.

They reach the turnoff to the northerly part of the island. Vince yanks hard on the steering wheel – too hard – and the Jetta sloughs around the corner. Ferris can’t think of anything to say, so he looks out the window. The island has, to use the misleading euphemism of real estate agents, developed. New homes sear the roadside, replacing the dense thickets of alder and fir that had been there since the glaciation.

The changes are so many that Ferris doesn’t recognize Vince and Ava’s old house when they pass it. Vince has to point it out. An addition has been built on, the yard backfilled, fresh paint. It looks like most of the other houses around it – an upmarket bungalow. When Vince and Ava lived there, it looked like what it was: a prefab starter home in a swampy yard filled with wrecked pickup trucks.

“When did you sell it?” Ferris asks.

“Four years ago, when Bobby moved out. I built the addition, and then we didn’t need it…” Vince trails off into silence.

That sounds about right to Ferris. Vince was always good at starting projects, not so great at figuring out the correct scale, and lousy at finishing them. Twelve years ago, Ferris helped him put in a fancy new septic system, an experimental one that didn’t work as advertised. Whenever it rained, the already swampy backyard turned into a private sewage lagoon, replete with floating turds and streamers of toilet paper. At least part of the cause was that Vince decided to route the eavestroughs into it, for reasons Vince couldn’t quite explain and which Ferris never got his mind around.

They talk briefly about what they’ve been doing in the last few years – or rather, Ferris questions Vince about what he’s been doing – teaching retarded teenagers – now challenged pre-adults – for some government program. Vince asks no questions and seems to have no curiosity about Ferris’s doings. Several miles pass. The density of development drops off and the island begins again to resemble the island Ferris knew.

“What’s the new place like?” he asks.

“Very different. You’ll see in a minute. Here’s the turnoff.”

Vince makes a right turn off the main road and bumps down a steep gravel hill toward the water. They’ve moved closer to the ocean, at least, Ferris thinks. For a moment it looks as if they’re right on the beach, but at the last minute Vince turns left into a deep draw sheltered by huge fir trees. It’s like a park, protected from both the main road above and the ocean winds. Vince pulls into a tiny driveway that backs onto a shed-like structure, cuts the ignition.

“Here we are,” he announces.

Ferris can’t see any house, and Ava isn’t to be seen either. Ferris retrieves the flowers from the rear seat and follows Vince along a treed path around the shed. Down a short but steep incline he can see a tiny cottage. It’s covered in varnished shiplap, with deep eaves, and a roof of shingled cedar. Smoke drifts up from the chimneys at each end. Beyond it is another building, unfinished, but about the same size.

“This is a change,” Ferris says, still wondering why Ava hasn’t appeared. In the old days, she always came out to greet him, a habit he attributed to her Yugoslav ethnic background – it was not then necessary to know if that meant Serbian, Slovenian, Croatian, or Muslim. It was, as far as he could see, her only ethnic tic. Otherwise she was as disenculturated as any WASP.

Vince waves his arm forward in reply, and Ferris skids down the mossy slope after him, and in his wake, tramps his way to the cottagey wooden back door. There is a small bell over it, on a string, and Vince tugs the string before entering. Ferris isn’t sure whether to expect Ava, or Goldilocks and the Three Bears. Vince pushes the door open.

Over his shoulder Ferris can see a sign that says “NO SHOES”. Vince bends over to remove his, and there is Ava. Her dark hair is peppered with grey, but God, she’s still beautiful. Ferris drinks her in, transfixed by a sense of relief. Without being conscious of it, he’s been imagining all kinds of horrible transformations – weight gain, accident scars, the coarsening of the features that women sometimes get under extended stress. For ten years he’s seen and heard nothing of or from her except a single telephone call he made five years ago. It wasn’t a long call. Ava cut him off in the middle of the opening pleasantries, saying that she and Vince were having problems; no, there was nothing Ferris could do, please stay clear.

“Ferris,” she says. “You’re here. It’s been a long time.”

Before Ferris can hand her the bouquet, Vince straightens up, completely blocking his view with his bulk. “Take off your shoes, Cuckoo,” he orders, curtly. “Things have changed.”

The last time Ferris saw Ava, he had anal intercourse with her while Vince had vaginal intercourse with her. As Ferris waits for Vince to move out of the doorway so he can remove his shoes and continue the conversation with Ava, he recognizes that something about that night was disturbing enough that he’s completely blocked it out. He can’t, for instance, remember the physical configuration of it. And that in itself is strange. In the past few days, a thousand other details of those years have flooded his memory, but not that one. It has vanished, including any memory of pleasure.

When he first met Ava, more than twenty-some years ago, he thought she was the prettiest – no, the most beautiful – woman he’d ever seen. And movie-star beautiful rather than modelbeautiful. She was tall, dark-haired, and darker eyed, with full breasts and hips, statuesque. Her breasts were too large for modelling, and she carried and cared for herself indifferently – without any sense of glamour. She rarely wore make-up and Ferris couldn’t recall seeing her in high heels. Here, he can’t even remember seeing her dressed up except the day she and Vince got married. That was the day Ferris met her.

It took a while, but when he got to know Ava, he liked her. She seemed bright enough even though she didn’t talk much. Ferris put that down to the fact that no one talked much around Vince. He dominated most conversations, and when he talked, you listened.

He never asked them when they got into group screwing, which of them initiated it, or exactly why they were doing it, but it had started before he entered their orbit. A few years after they got married, Vince began to talk about it – proudly, as if it were a badge of their openness and modernity. At first Ferris thought he was bullshitting. Talk is cheap, and Vince was a talker. And even if he was telling the truth, well, so what? It was the aftermath of the 1960s, when everybody thought they had the duty – and maybe even a basic right – to grope anyone they found attractive in whatever configuration appealed to them at the moment. The more bizarre the better.

Oh, Ferris had his fantasies about such things, but in strictly democratic terms, as a foursome, in which he and whatever partner he was with would sleep with others. Like most men (and maybe women) in those days, he was as interested as the next person in sleeping with new partners, but giving up bodily possession of his own in the deal was just too threatening. He’d occasionally entertained fantasies of a threesome involving two women, but not with much enthusiasm. He assumed that such a configuration would be centred on the male, and he had enough doubts about his stamina and gifts as a lover that he didn’t indulge the fantasies very far. Two men and a woman hadn’t occurred to him.

The first time Vince asked Ferris to join them, he said no. Thankfully, Vince didn’t persist beyond calling him a reactionary. Ferris didn’t say so, but he was quite willing to be reactionary. It was easier just to screw around, thanks. He preferred to have his adventures one-on-one, where the social politics were a little easier to sort out.

Ferris dutifully removes his shoes and tries to evaluate what he’s seen so far – Vince’s relative silence on the drive over, the look on Ava’s face as she greeted him. He’s asked for the visit, so he can’t fault them if they don’t want to be hospitable. It occurs to him that he’d asked Vince, and that Vince has never denied him anything. Judging from Ava, she has misgivings about him being there.

Well, what should I expect, Ferris muses as he parks his shoes beside Vince’s larger ones and picks up the bouquet. He’s already frustrated by the palpable barrier between them, but he doesn’t know what to do about it. Lord only knows why it’s really there – it’s been ten years, they’ve had a rough time domestically, and he still knows nothing definite about why.

He has a theory, if you can call it that, based on what Vince told him on the phone. Eight years ago they adopted a foster child about a year younger than Bobby, an eleven-year-old girl with learning disabilities. It was Vince’s way of bringing his work home, and Ferris’s guess is that it went badly. How or why, he doesn’t have a clue. It occurs to him now that the one time he talked to Ava, also on the phone, they were probably in the midst of that mess.

There is another possibility, a simpler one. Maybe they’re just wary of him and of what he might want. That makes a certain sense, except that wariness isn’t something he’s seen in either of them before. When you’ve been in every nook and cranny of another person’s body, and that person has shown no hint of reluctance or displeasure, you don’t expect them to respond to you with suspicion, not even after ten years. Or at least Ferris doesn’t.

He’s a bit simple-minded about certain things, our Ferris. He thinks, for instance, that intimacies are permanent even though he will tell you that nothing lasts forever. Some tangled circuit in his brain insists, against logic and common sense, that anyone who has cared for him once always will. He understands that the world and human beings aren’t perfect, but he retains a perfect ego anyway. Is this familiar to anyone out there? Is there another name for this? Stupidity?

Ferris follows Vince into the tiny kitchen. Vince, Ferris notes, brushes past Ava without touching her. Ferris stops in front of her and presents her with the bouquet. He most definitely does want to touch her, to look at her, to see for himself. For a moment he just looks at her, and she stares back without taking the flowers out of his hand, a slight smile on her lips that doesn’t touch her eyes. He brushes back a stray lock of her hair and leans in to kiss her cheek.

“Well,” she says, taking a step backward but not quite flinching, “do come in and sit down. Would you like some tea or coffee?”

The three of them negotiate a pot of herbal tea, and while Ava finds a vase for the bouquet, Ferris looks around. Despite the hominess of the cottage, it is Spartan. There are no paintings or prints on the walls, and no personal mementos to be seen. Vince and Ava, Bobby, the foster daughter, and everyone else – parents and friends alike – have been disappeared.

Ferris ambles over to the couch, sits down, and surveys the cottage. The orderliness of it is startling. The Vince he knows isn’t like this, not in any way. He’s always been a bouncer – a project here, an idea there – the projects never quite complete, the ideas never entirely coherent. Ava lived amidst his chaos without any evident discomfort, or, now that he considers it, deep interest. She wasn’t a compulsive housekeeper or much of a cook. She seemed to be in her own private universe, even as a parent – not that he saw much parenting or much of Bobby – the boy was always visiting “elsewhere” when Ferris visited. Ferris suspected that Ava was competent but slightly indifferent as mothers go. But if she didn’t exert much control in the household, in the bedroom she was definitely in charge – and the bedroom had very elastic proportions.

There was the time she greeted him on arrival with a blowjob: no formalities permitted, not a word of explanation. Ferris stood in the doorway with his back to the road, his arms braced against the doorjambs and watched her slip his cock in and out of her throat with an exquisitely firm touch grasping and sucking on the in-stroke, and vibrating her tongue across his glans on the out.

Anyone driving by would have recognized exactly what she was up to, but it didn’t take very long, and the road remained empty. When she was finished, she stood up, kissed him, and slipped his own come into his mouth. Then, grinning, she told him it was an experiment – she wanted to see how fast she could make him come.

Watching Vince and Ava dither in the kitchen, Ferris has another moment of doubt. Why did he come here? With some fatuous hope that nothing changes? Aside from a salting of grey hair, Ava seems to be the same woman – physically. But she is wary, chastened, closed, and now it comes to him, unerotic. Why?

Ferris is suddenly assailed by a flood of erotic memories. The way it started, for instance: Vince invites him for dinner. Ferris is between relationships, so he comes alone, dressed in bluejeans and shirt and tie, bringing a bottle of wine and flowers – they were chrysanthemums, so it would have been autumn. Ferris always keeps his seasons straight that way.

He’s expecting a family dinner, to yap with the kid, and leave early. When he arrives there are only the two of them. Bobby is staying with an aunt.

At the dinner table the conversation rolls around to sex. Vince is doing the talking. Ferris isn’t saying much, and Ava is impersonating the Mona Lisa, watching them both with an amused expression on her beautiful face. The flashpoint is sexual jealousy which Ferris uncomfortably admits to feeling. Who doesn’t?

“I don’t,” Vince claims. “I’ve never felt a twinge of it.”

“I don’t believe you,” Ferris says.

Vince grins. “That’s just your threatened sexuality talking,” he answers. “Ava can fuck with whoever she wants. So long as she experiences pleasure, I do too.”

“I suppose you sit on your hands and watch.”

“Sometimes.” Vince answers as if it were a completely mundane matter of fact. “But usually not for long.”

Ferris eyes Ava, imagining her moaning and bucking in a stranger’s embrace while Vince calmly watches. It’s an arousing image, but one that makes his spine contract. It’s Ferris’s exgirlfriend making it with her new man, and Ferris is being forced to watch – or is it Vince watching him and his ex?

Across the table, Ava unbuttons her blouse. She’s not wearing a brassiere. She begins to fondle her nipples. They’re inverted, and as Ferris stares, they grow erect beneath her fingers. Vince is watching her too, saying something Ferris doesn’t follow. He sounds like a television game show host. With an effort, Ferris focuses on what he’s saying.

“Well,” Ferris hears Vince saying, “why don’t you show Ferris what I’m talking about?”

Ava murmurs an “Uhhmm” that is neither concurrence nor question, and stands up, sloughing off her blouse as she does so. She walks around the table, slips to her knees in front of Ferris, and begins to unzip his fly, nuzzling his crotch as she does it. Woodenly, Ferris helps her, undoing his belt and freeing his erect penis from his jeans. She inhales it expertly. Within seconds he’s on the verge of coming, and she senses it. She pulls back, holding the head between two fingers, and looks up at him.

“Oh, no you don’t,” she says.

She leads him to the couch, where she slips off her skirt and sinks back against the material. She’s not wearing panties. Ferris crouches between her thighs and lifts her legs over his shoulders. He tried to give her head, but she isn’t very interested. She grabs his hair and looks into his eyes, the same amused look on her face.

“I want you inside me,” she said. It’s an order.

It’s like a pornographic movie to Ferris, and he has to remind himself that this is really happening. He looks over at Vince, who is still sitting at the dinner table with an I-told-you-so smirk on his face. Ferris tries to slow down, to think of other things as he strips off his clothes, but it’s impossible. His sense of irony has deserted him, and for the first time he can remember, there is no part of him standing aside, watching and analyzing. Vince is the watcher, here.

For a while, anyway. Ferris glimpses Vince removing his clothes, and as he kneels in front of Ava again, Vince moves past him to sit on the arm of the couch, his erection bobbing against her face. She slurps it hungrily as Ferris penetrates her.

Ferris comes in a few strokes, and in a state that is about equal parts tumescence and culture shock he watches his first live blowjob. At a distance of less than two feet, it goes on too long and it looks awkward. Eventually Vince pulls away, and as if Ferris isn’t there, he pulls Ava off the couch onto the rug and mounts her.

Ferris does not quite know what to do, so he covers his confusion with a feigned empiricism. He lies on the rug beside them, watching Ava’s face as they fuck. It’s easier to watch her than him, somehow, or it. She remains composed and conscious, taking his hand and pulling it in to fondle her nipples as Vince pumps away, lost in his own groaning, grunting ecstasy. He takes what seems like forever to have an orgasm, and through most of it Ava’s eyes are locked on Ferris, beads of sweat rolling off her forehead and neck, her hand rhythmically gripping his wrist as Vince’s thrusts pound into her. When Vince finally does come it sounds and looks like he’s dying. Ferris is half convinced that he and Vince are from a different species. But he doesn’t get to think that one through. Ava reaches over, grabs his hair and pulls him to her. He kisses her lips, licks the sweat from her face. Behind him he feels Vince running his tongue along his spine. He closes his eyes.

Ava comes out of the kitchen with a teapot and three mugs on a tray. Vince follows with small cream and sugar jugs in matching ceramics, and some spoons. She slides the tray onto the coffee table, and Ferris realizes that she’s left the vase back in the kitchen.

“That’s milk there,” she says, motioning at the cream jug. “I trust that will be fine.”

The way she says it lets Ferris know she’s not interested in the answer.

“Milk’s fine,” he says.

Vince eases his big body into the chair across from the couch, and Ava pulls one of the wooden chairs from the table and sits down opposite him, beside Vince.

“What do you think?” Vince asks, leaning over to pour the tea.

Ferris isn’t sure what he’s referring to, then realizes that he’s being asked his opinion about the cottage.

“It looks pretty good,” he says. “But very different, no? The old place was…”

“Bigger,” Ava intervenes. “There’s just the two of us, you know. And we live very quietly.”

“I’ll show you the workshop later,” Vince adds. “You’ll like it.”

“You did all this yourself?”

“We did it,” Ava says, emphasizing the “we”.

Ferris can’t quite stifle a smile. The Vince he knew would have cut off both thumbs before a quarter of this got completed. “You mean, you did it.”

“I took a carpentry course, actually,” Ava answers, a dry smile crossing her face momentarily.

Vince hands Ferris a mug of tea, with milk and sugar already in it. Not the kind of detail he’d have expected Vince to remember, but he does. And Ferris doesn’t point it out. Instead, he recognizes that this is the most formal the three of them have ever been with one another, and the tension is exquisite. On the tail of that thought rides another: We want this to be over, all three of us. In our different ways.

Ferris doesn’t know where to begin. Nothing new in that, Ferris muses. Well, there were always interminable awkwardnesses to this. How can you have casual conversation with a married couple immediately after you’ve had sex with them? You can’t talk about the weather, because there isn’t any. The world disappears, replaced by one’s own overdrawn senses. You place your fingers in front of your nostrils and there is her scent, yours, and a third. There is a drop of come on your leg. Whose is it?

Then there were the other, trickier questions that Ferris couldn’t quite ask: What is this for? Why Ferris and not someone else? Where is this supposed to lead?

If Vince had answers to those questions, he didn’t offer them. He travelled in Ava’s erotic wake, revelling in the foam of her mysterious agenda like a dolphin in the backwash of a ship. For Ava, there didn’t seem to be any questions. She was inside, and of, the events, and one event simply led to the next.

Not Ferris. The minute the event was done, he wanted to know where, and why, and what. And the only answers he got were what came next.

There were explanations to be had, of course. The first was predictable, and it brooked no further inquiry: Why not? That was the battle cry of their generation, but in this case Ferris couldn’t quite separate the question and its answer from Why me and not others?

That got explained indirectly. There were others. A woman, whose name he was given along with explicit descriptions of what had gone on. She was Ava’s choice, Ferris gathered, although no one said so. Ferris wanted to know whose choice he’d been, but he didn’t ask.

The other explanations made his head spin. They’d wanted him for years. They loved him, in fact. Both of them, yes. Love, and friendship. Why not?

This revelation muddied things further. In theory he too loved his friends, Vince included. Maybe particularly. But neither love nor friendship would have occasioned him to invite Vince to sleep with his women, alone or with Ferris watching or participating. What did Vince get out of this? Was it just for the erotic kick he got?

“All those things are part of sex, Cuckoo,” Vince explained one night when Ferris pushed the subject. “Ava wanted you. I did too.”

“We didn’t pick you out of a police line-up,” Ava added. “Don’t make this too complicated or it’ll screw you up.”

“It is complicated,” Ferris said.

“Well,” Ava said, “you know what they say.”

“What do they say?”

“They say that when a married woman wants to sleep with another man it means there’s something wrong with her marriage.”

“What do they say about men doing the same thing?”

She laughed. “They say it just means he has testicles.”

“Yeah, well, who the hell are they, anyway?” Ferris said, getting irritable.

“They’re the part of you that wants to believe what they say.”

That didn’t quite answer the question Ferris couldn’t bring himself to ask either of them: Why does Ava love me?

The question, after ten years, is still there. In fact, it has grown. Now he wants to know how Ava loved him, not just why. And his perfect ego, stupid as always, wants to know if she still does.

Both Ava and Vince are gazing at him impatiently.

“Well,” Ferris says, pausing to sip the tea. “I guess we should get on with it.”

“I’m not sure what we’re supposed to get on with,” Ava answers, irony distributed about equally through the sentence. It coats each word with ice.

“I guess,” Ferris says, hesitantly, “I want to know what’s become of you. And I still don’t quite understand us.”

Another hesitation. Ava arches her eyebrows, Vince looks out the window. Ferris knows he sounds like a fifteen-year-old explaining why he’s come home late with the family car.

“What happened, like.”

Ava rolls her tongue around across her top lip. Ferris recognizes the gesture, but it means something quite new.

“You disappeared,” she says. “That’s what happened. Not a word, no goodbye, no nothing. Why do you want to know what happened? You were there. And you weren’t. Were we supposed to come looking for you?”

Ferris shivers again, involuntarily. Was it really that open? A free choice, openly offered despite the nature of their arrangement and its strange discretions? Maybe.

He senses that it was, and then again it wasn’t. It explains how easily he walked away from it, and it explains why they didn’t come looking for him. But it doesn’t explain either what they did together. And it leaves out the intervening years, and it says nothing about the obvious truth that a menage-a-trois isn’t exactly a configuration built for stability, emotional or any other kind. It was asymmetrical, unbalanced. With them – or maybe it was only with Ferris – the imbalances shifted constantly, creating new ground that was always somehow weirder. He’d get his head around one part of it, and the norm would move beyond, out there.

Vince doesn’t say anything. He looks over at Ava and smiles, wearily. She smiles back, wryly, as if she’s explaining something obvious to an obtuse child. “Maybe it’s time you told us what was happening, Ferris.”

Ferris puzzles over the solidarity he senses between Vince and Ava. It doesn’t have anything to do with sex. Its basis is an almost monastic separateness, a formality that precludes sexuality rather than preludes it.

If he’s reading it right, it’s a dramatic change for Ava. The one certainty about her was her readiness for sex, anytime, any place, the weirder the better. She simply liked to have cocks around her or inside her, preferably more than one. Well, “simply” isn’t the right word. She seemed to take her greatest pleasures from controlling him and Vince – from making them lose control, to be exact, and in being able to dictate where, when, and how they got off. She liked to see them come – liked to see the imminent orgasms, the helpless heedlessness of them, in their eyes. Sometimes Ferris thought he detected a kind of contempt for their immense, brainless neediness.

He’s pretty sure she didn’t have orgasms herself. And God knows he tried to make her have them. For nearly a year he became obsessed by it, going down on her literally for hours, licking and stroking every fold of flesh he could get his tongue on, keeping himself glued to her clitoris while Vince fucked her, whatever he could think of to get her over.

It never quite happened. She’d reach a plateau of pleasure, cruise it for a brief time, and then subside back to her zone of control. Vince seemed oblivious to all this, and Ferris didn’t ever ask either of them about it. It was, after all, her show, and if not, then their show.

After an arduous session one night, Vince went off for a shower, leaving him to cuddle Ava. She suddenly sat up on the bed with her back to him.

“I’m in love with you, Ferris,” she said, very slowly and carefully, as if she were pronouncing some sort of curse. He felt his heart constrict. Vince had already established that she loved him, but this was different. The situation was already crazy, and this zoomed it a lot crazier. Here was a woman, someone else’s wife, a woman he’d been intimate with in almost every way except the conventional ones, and now she seemed to be saying she wanted to have an affair with him, and maybe a lot more than that.

“You know how I feel about you,” Ferris answered after a tense silence. It was a careful answer, as careful as he could make it. Ferris wasn’t sure what he felt for her, and he didn’t want to use the word “love”. Love is something people settle into, a comfortable, conventional intimacy. This wasn’t comfortable, and it sure as hell wasn’t conventional. He’d tried to convince himself that it was just sex, something they did without needing to talk about it. He knew that this wasn’t quite accurate, but it made it easier to cope with.

“I don’t know,” she said, still not looking at him. “I don’t know what you feel at all, Ferris, and I don’t know what you think. You come here and we do all this, we make love, we fuck, but what does it count for?”

“A lot.”

That was true. It did count for a lot, but what “a lot” meant, he couldn’t have said. And here was a problem. It was great sex, great. No other word sufficed. And it satisfied his hunger for transgression, his need to affront convention. But how important was that out in the world? Not very, if he could walk away from it for weeks and months at a stretch. And what did it say about how he felt toward either of them? Not much.

“A lot?” she repeated. “You leave here in the morning like you’re escaping. Where do you go? I don’t know anything about your life. Do you ever think about me – about us – when you don’t have your face buried between my legs?”

It was a deadly question – and he didn’t have to answer it. Vince came out of the bathroom, still wet from the shower, with a towel around his head and shoulders. “So,” he asked, “what are you two talking about?”

Before Ferris could dodge, Vince told him what he thought the conversation was about. “Ava wants to have a child with you. I think it’s a good idea.”

This wasn’t what he and Ava were talking about, was it? He glanced at Ava and could read nothing, either way, from her expression. Maybe this is how she explained it to Vince, or maybe it was how Vince explained it to himself, made it into a practical reality. Vince’s version was the more frightening, but either way, it scared the shit out of Ferris.

“You already have a child,” Ferris said, tentatively. “If you want another, why don’t you just go ahead and have one?”

“We didn’t think about it until a little while ago,” Vince said. “I had a vasectomy last year. Didn’t think we’d want more kids. But Ava really loves you, Ferris. So do I. And why not?”

Ferris’s head was spinning. On this one, he could think of several dozen reasons why not, the best of them practical. Whose child would it be? Who would raise it? He was number three in this relationship in every way, and so far that had been fine. But what would happen if they were to throw a child out into the mix? Would the child have two fathers?

Oh no, Ferris could see that this was altogether too crazy.

“This is a pretty amazing proposition,” he said, trying to compose himself. “I need some time to think about it.”

“Oh, sure,” Vince said, very serious now. “Think about it.”

Ferris takes a sip of tea. “I’m thinking about that time you asked me if I wanted to father a child with you,” he says. “I never understood that.”

Vince shrugs. “What’s to understand? At the time, it was a serious offer. But you would have had to make a commitment, and you didn’t. So it passed. That’s when I began to realize just how screwed up you were, actually.”

Ferris looks to Ava for confirmation. She looks out the window, and then back at him. “It was a bad idea,” she says, slowly. “We had a lot of those, if you recall.”

Oh yes, indeed. The worst one was Ferris’s, kicked off from that incident. He decided that he wanted Ava for himself. Or at least, he wanted to see what it would be like between just the two of them. An affair, or whatever it might be called in the circumstances. The nomenclature would need to be peculiar, but then his feelings for her were peculiar. Until that moment putting a name to them hadn’t seemed relevant, or rather, it hadn’t seemed possible.

Ava went along with it, for as far as it went. They met several times in anonymous hotels. Ferris was all over her, and she was either bored or diffident – Ferris couldn’t decide which it was. He did everything he could to make her lose control of her reserve, to orgasm, but even though he licked and sucked and fucked her until she was raw he couldn’t get her half as close as Vince and he did together. She let him do whatever he wanted, affectionate and slightly impatient at the same time, as if she were humouring a child. Whatever he thought he was doing, it was wide of the mark, and Ava gave him no hint of any alternative. Maybe she felt guilty because Vince wasn’t there. After a while, Ferris did.

Alone, he and Ava discovered they had little to talk about. By unspoken agreement, they didn’t talk about Vince or about the ménage-à-trois. They didn’t talk about being in love, or about having a child, although Ferris imagined that he might be getting her pregnant. They didn’t discuss how either of them got to the hotel, or how she would get back to the island afterward, they didn’t discuss work or children, and they barely talked about the weather. They were left with a present that had to subsist within the walls of the hotel room, and a future that they might be risking by being there.

They met in the hotel lobby, rushed to the room, made love, and lay in the darkness without speaking. If this was the real thing, it wasn’t nearly as exciting as the unrealities they were cheating on. Ava didn’t get pregnant, and they stopped meeting without having to admit they were going to. Ferris was disappointed and relieved at the same time.

Now, here, he has a sudden instinct that Vince had known about it all along, and that if not, he certainly knew now. “I had some dumb ideas in those days,” Ferris says, looking at Vince and feeling guilty.

“You mean like trying to take Ava away from me?” he says. “Yeah, I knew you were trying. I wasn’t worried. I thought you’d figure it out for yourself soon enough.”

“How did you find out?”

“Ava told me she was seeing you. I told you we trusted each other completely. You didn’t believe it like you didn’t believe a lot of the rest of what I said. More tea?”

Ferris decided to leave “the rest of it” alone. “Another cup is fine. Why didn’t you stop it?”

“Why should I? Ava was crazy about you… and I thought you might see what we were offering you.”

Ava fills Ferris’s cup, tops up her own and Vince’s, and goes off to the kitchen to make more. Watching her do this simple thing, Ferris tries to fathom how she sorted out complexities like the ones he’d created for her. Did she sort them out at all? He could hardly fault her if she didn’t. He hadn’t, not really.

From the beginning of it, Ferris had difficulty living with the idea that he was sexually involved with a married couple. How many times had he sat on the ferry on the trip back and told himself it was too weird, that he couldn’t handle it any longer?

Yes, but it was also the ferry rides, together with the isolation of the island, that protected it, and him. No one knew he had this other life. To his friends, Ferris was someone who sometimes disappeared for a few days, that’s all. Not generally available on weekends. If a friend asked where he was, he mentioned business. If business associates asked, he used his friends as an excuse.

After the “affair” ended, it got harder, and he didn’t return to the island at one point for almost eight months. He found several new lovers, tried hard to stay interested in them, but couldn’t. When he started coming back to the island regularly, there were no recriminations, no oblique punishments, no reluctances. But there was a subtle erotic escalation, so subtle that he didn’t notice it at first.

Ferris was conducting his own subtle escalation. He was competing with Vince, holding off his orgasms until after Vince had his, or breaking off to watch them fuck, nestling close to Ava, cuddling her, kissing her breasts or face or neck, holding her eyes with his while Vince came. Then he’d have her to himself, and he put on performances that were as much for Vince as for Ava.

They weren’t always comfortable performances, because Vince had some unsubtle ways of watching. He’d lie with his face next to Ava’s vagina, slipping Ferris’s cock out of her and into his mouth for a few strokes. Or while Ferris was fucking with Ava, Vince would play with his balls, or lick his asshole. Several times Vince insisted on joining in on fellatio – at least once, due to last-second manoeuvres, Ferris came in Vince’s mouth. Vince seemed to enjoy all of this, and Ferris, well, didn’t.

Meanwhile, the configurations and combinations were escalating, getting wilder and weirder. Each round of love-making seemed to require a new configuration. Some of them were simply contortions – easy enough to adapt to. Then came vibrators and dildos, an uncomplicated fourth partner. There was a decipherable symmetry to the escalations. Each time, Ferris was offered the more extreme posture. At the next session, Vince began there. Oils appeared, anal intercourse was introduced. At that, Ferris at first balked.

“Don’t be a prude,” Vince said. “It isn’t painful if it’s done right. You lubricate properly, and come into her from the front, just like conventional fucking. You’ll like it. She does.”

Ava, lying between them on the bed, arched her back and licked her lips.

Then Ava wanted them both in her vagina at the same time. It was a difficult, contorted manoeuvre, and Ferris was convinced that it was painful for her. A few days afterward, he phoned and asked her point-blank.

“It was pleasant,” she said, her voice cool. “Should we be talking about this on the phone?”

“It didn’t look like it was pleasant,” he said. “It looked painful. And it felt painful.”

“It hurt you?” she answered, her tone still cool.

“No, damn it. It hurt you. I hurt you.”

“Ferris, sweetie,” she said as if instructing a child. “Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference between pleasure and pain. In any case, if I’d wanted you to stop, I would have said so.”

“You would have.”

“Yes. Don’t you understand that?”

He told her he did.

Ferris realizes that he’s staring at Ava, remembering being in those strange and stranger embraces with her, helplessly recalling her scent and taste and the myriad erotic postures in which he’s seen her exquisite body. He knows more about her, been more intimate with her than any woman he’s been with. At the same time, he knows nothing about her, nothing comfortably human. Doesn’t intimacy leave indelible traces? Where are they, here?

“Don’t, Ferris,” Ava says. “I don’t want to be looked at like that. Not by you, or Vince, or anyone else.”

“I’m sorry,” he says. He is sorry. “That certainly isn’t why I’m here.”

“So why are you here, exactly?”

Tough question. Mentally he goes over the list: curiosity about the events of the last ten years, an old friend’s and lover’s distant concern, some personal curiosity about how a beautiful woman has aged. All acceptable motives. But there’s a surprise item on the list, and it isn’t acceptable: Ferris isn’t sure he wouldn’t tumble into the sack with them right now if they proposed it.

He frowns, tries to rid himself of the thought. “Tell me what happened with the child you adopted.”

Ava looks at the floor, and Vince sinks back in his chair with a sigh.

“There’s not much to tell,” he says. “She had learning disabilities, you knew that. She didn’t improve, and by the time she was fifteen, we had a major behaviour problem on our hands. All sorts of incidents, one thing after another. Eventually she was caught breaking into the house of one of our neighbours, and she got sent to a juvenile home. We sprung her, but after that, it was worse. She’d be here for a few days, and then she’d disappear for weeks on end. Then she stopped coming. We don’t even know where she is, now. In jail, I think.”

“I’m sorry,” Ferris says. “What about Bobby?”

“What about him?” Vince replies. “He’s around. He has his own place in town, works, goes to school part-time. He just outgrew the island, that’s all. This isn’t much of a place for young people.”

“Are you two happy?”

Ava answers. “Sometimes. Yes.” There’s a long hesitation. “We’ve been in therapy for three years. That’s helped a lot.”

“What for?” Ferris asks, without thinking.

“It got out of hand,” Vince answers for her. “There was nothing in our lives but sex. It was an addiction.”

Their distance makes it feel more like there’s a continent between them and him rather than a few feet. The distance was there when he arrived, but now it is tangible. And it is growing, solidifying.

“We didn’t understand that, not really. Nobody does, anymore. We thought the pleasure we wanted, or whatever it is life is about, was somewhere else, something else, someone else. That’s what you were all about, what that whole thing was about. It felt like a big mountain we were climbing, but we were only climbing out of ourselves. We discovered that what matters is the village at the base of the mountain. Now we get up in the morning and work on things. One day at a time.”

Ferris can feel disappointment straining against his discretion. Vince has just given him a cliche-ridden Alcoholics Anonymous speech. It’s evidently a sincere one, and the small smile on Ava’s face as he speaks confirms her agreement.

“But you know, Ferris,” Vince says after an awkward silence Ferris doesn’t break, “we’re okay, now. It started to come around when we realized that life isn’t supposed to be easy. None of what we did was a total waste of time. We had to go through it and come out on the other side. I think that’s what you’re doing, too, in your own way. It’s too bad you have to do it alone.”

Ferris shrugs. Maybe, just maybe, it is that simple. The way they lived, the dangers must have kept growing, while the payoffs got smaller, or at least harder to find. Eventually, the accumulated discretions and indiscretions must have toppled over on them in some terrible way. Maybe in the real world, maybe just in their minds. But maybe they just got tired of the complications, and stopped. So maybe the unfinished business he came here to settle isn’t unfinished, and there are no revelations forthcoming.

Well, not quite. Ever since he got on the ferry this morning, he’s been wrestling, somewhere in his subconscious, with the puzzle of how Vince and he performed simultaneous anal and vaginal intercourse with Ava. He’s certain it took place, because he can distinctly remember the sensation of his and Vince’s penises touching through the thin membrane between them. What’s bothering him – what’s been bothering him for a long time – is the configuration.

It was part of an obscure fidelity Ferris kept, and he’d been subtle enough with it that he was certain that neither Vince nor Ava were aware of it. But throughout everything they did, Ferris had not once entered Ava unless they were face to face. Now, suddenly, he realizes the configuration he wants isn’t physically possible. He’s been deluding himself. Vince had been on his back, she kneeling forward on his chest, and Ferris was squatting behind her. In the crudest possible sense, Ferris had fucked her up the ass, impersonally, like a dog would. And for ten years, he’d been blocking the memory of it.

“What’s wrong, Ferris?” he hears Ava asking. His consternation must have shown in his face. “Were you expecting more?”

Ferris looks at the ceiling. “No,” he says. “I just thought of something. It’s obscure stuff. Nothing to do with you.”

He wants to tell Ava he’s sorry, but what he’s sorry about is so oblique there’s no way he can make her understand – even if she wanted to. It’s the truth, but sex delivers an almost infinite number of truths, all equal. It’s also true that he didn’t return after that because he was frightened to. Beyond unrestricted pleasure he’d glimpsed its opposites: violence and pain. And in Ferris’s mind, they had crossed the boundary.

Or maybe that’s what I’m seeing and saying, and Ferris is nothing but a sexual cuckoo that vacated the nest when it got too hot inside. I’d like Ferris to see it, but what’s the point of inflicting my erotic insights on him – or on Vince and Ava? I could do all sorts of comforting things here. I could make Ferris grovel for forgiveness, join their chapter of Sexaholics Anonymous – or form his own. I could force him to admit that he’d started a primary relationship soon after he left, and when that failed, another, ad nauseam. Or less comforting, I could make him confess a secret he’s kept even from himself: that sex was never so good as it was with them, not before, nor after.

But there’s nothing discreet for him to say, nothing he needs to know or say about this. By a different route, he’s come to the same conclusions they have. It’s time to go.

“I should catch the next ferry back,” Ferris says. “But you’re right. Life isn’t supposed to be easy: I just wish I’d known that twenty years ago.”

Ava smiles. It’s a real one this time, and as Ferris gets up to leave, she reaches over and grasps his hand. “So do we,” she says. “But we didn’t.”

It’s too early to leave for the ferry, so Ferris and Vince wander out to the workshop, where Vince shows him an array of power tools and a birdhouse he’s planning to elevate next to the livingroom window. It’s a mess, big enough to house a raven, but Ferris doesn’t say so.

On the ferry back from the island, Ferris writes this in his notebook:

What if our erotic lives are not written on water; but are a kind of graffiti scribbled on the planetary and cosmic slate, an inscription of meaningless insights and temporary states of emotions and prejudice by which we are nonetheless going to be mercilessly judged, not by a divine being but by the volume of darkness and misery we generate with them.

“Well then,” he says aloud. “I will generate no more darkness.”

The man sitting next to him looks up from the book he’s been dozing over. “What did you say? Were you talking to me?”

Ferris laughs. “No,” he says. “Not directly. Thinking out loud, I guess.”

He pulls his bag onto his shoulder. The ferry is nearing the mainland terminal, but he’s got time for a pee before it docks. After that, he has distant places to go, faraway people to meet and write lies about.

Over the urinal is scribbled the following barely literate message:

I guess the confusion is universal, Ferris thinks to himself as he tries to come up with an answer to the graffito. Trouble is, it exists in specific conditions. Some of them lead easily to violence, others get resolved by small bursts of insight, and some simply remain unanswered and unrelieved.

He feels the gentle bump of the ferry meeting the slip, hears the rumble of the motors as they reverse. He leaves the graffito unanswered, and seconds later he’s back in the crowd of travellers hurrying to the next destination.