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Not smart he told the mirror in the office bathroom, where he splashed off his face and tried to view himself as she would.
Sallow, less hair, but the phallic vein pulsing in his forehead gave him the frank, bemused gaze of a man with enough intelligence and good will to articulate this paradox: the best sex with wives is often had pretending they are strangers, whereas with strangers you have to be willing to consider you want them enough to make them wives, so you can have sex always, pretending they are strangers. She knows me, she knows me not. I know her, I know her not: sex like that Escher print in which the hand draws a hand drawing a hand drawing a hand.
Where does it end? In the act. The only way out of the hall of mirrors was to follow his cock. A phrase came to him that so pithily summarized the line of thought he had been entertaining, he couldn't resist violating their agreement, and sharing it:
I want you
in the flesh
in the flesh
What he got back from her, with surprising alacrity, alarmed him:
Walked around all afternoon wanting to kiss you. Have you
read the British psychoanalyst Adam Phillips book ON
KISSING, TICKLING AND BEING BORED? He sez kissing sooooo nice
because (69 aside, not face-to-face) it's the only sexual act you
can't do on yourself. Maybe so. I bring the back of
my own hand to my mouth, pretending, but doesn't do
trick. So how old are your kids? Have you seen "The Magic
School Bus"? I see my tongue riding into your mouth like that
bus . . . I am tunneling into you, you into me/God it is
EMBARRASSING how focused i am on
PENETRATION
as if penetration will make me penetrating
(is this too LITERARY?
sorry
oops time for meeting
XXOO
K.
"Literary" was not the problem. He had dated his share of English majors and could cope with the stray allusion, even lob one back.
What disturbed him was the recognition that like most women she was going to want to talk about sex, whereas for him, the ideal act was essentially wordless. You should not need to ask was it good for you. If you were contrite, you should not need to say it with flowers. Men did not feel less than women, but they bought less stock in the expression of feeling; the axiom that "letting it out" "made you feel better" was the equivalent, for his money, of kissing a kid's boo-boo. Mere voodoo. Certain things felt bad because they should feel bad — failure, grief — and other things, like sex, should feel good. What was to discuss?
Already he suspected her suspicion: He had put out for bid an "imaginary woman" with specs to which she had precipitously failed to conform, by being a "real person." They hadn't met! What could be less "real" than that! This was all wheel-spinning. He wrote back:
(H)E-said, (sh)e-said:
Let us not too prematurely shoot our cyberwad
(return to Plan A?)
SEE YOU ON TUES stop CANT WAIT stop, he added, then returned his brain to work, hoping that the play on telegram format would seem an acceptable rejoinder to her fancier formulations.
But it didn't.
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©2000 Lisa Zeidner and Nerve.com, Inc.
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