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Not lewd, not urbane, not leering or concupiscent, but devotional. That is how I felt about Katherine and Phillip, and about the man I offered them up to. He looked for jolting carnality, for physical imperatives. "Didn't more rules appear with a certain periodicity?" he wanted to know.
We were awake in the middle of the night, in the early morning, really. I had been lying still, rubbing a finger on the mended spot on the sheet where hydrogen peroxide had made a hole when he rubbed at a spot of blood — not mine. He got out of bed to turn off the air conditioner, and wrapped himself around me when he returned. With no need of a segue from my hurried-off clothes on the floor, I said, "I can't remember — does the week in Acapulco count as one time?"
"I want each time in Acapulco," he said, as I knew he would.
I gave him a familiar travelogue just to see how long until he'd interrupt with "Cut to the chase — the beach, the
waves, sunset, dinner, you're back in the house in bed."
I pushed him off me so that he could come back even closer.
"We chose a room with a skylight above the bed. It was smaller than the other bedrooms in the rented house, but we wanted to see the stars. Phillip would not be joining us for another day or two, so the mood was hen party, sorority house."
He moved steadily inside me, so wonderfully inside me as I spoke. When he asked me a question, he spoke into my mouth. I had to turn my head and tell him to repeat it in my ear.
He smoothed his hands down my silk camisole and asked me if I needed to be coaxed. |
He smoothed his hands down my silk camisole and asked me if I needed to be coaxed. "Did you reach for Katherine first?"
"Not then, maybe not ever," I said. "It was not a lack of desire," I told him. "I took an active part by setting desire in motion. To be in a condition of readiness is to participate fully," I said. "As I am now."
"Show me what she did to make you come that night," he said.
In showing him, I took him to the other side of himself.
A short time later, he pulled me down to the thick carpet in front of the tall oval mirror. He put a pillow beneath my head, and another under my hips. He said, "When Phillip arrived, did the three of you spend that night in the room with the skylight?"
In fact, I remembered pleading exhaustion that night, and sleeping by myself downstairs. But there was nothing for him in that. I gave him instead a scene from a live act I watched through a one-way mirror in a South-of-Market theater. Phillip had taken me there on a night when prohibitions turned into permissions. Neither of us had told Katherine.
I dressed for him on the night that made it a month since I had started meeting him at the loft downtown where he waited for me "all pins-and-needle-y," he said.
I had had to go to a dinner first, a benefit for something worth giving money to. The transition was too quick, the way it is when you fly to a place that you need train time to adjust to. On the way to the loft, I had felt tired by what went on there, by the bottomless pit of it, the ever-ratcheted-up attempts to hold his attention on me.
In the bedroom there was a movie playing. I recognized it as one of the red-boxed collection in his bedroom closet. We had watched this one before, the one in which the male star auditions Polish girls for his next film. Were they really in Poland in the film? Who could tell? What mattered was that these were the girls who would do anything, anywhere.
I arrived during the scene where the two girls, maybe nineteen years old, are lying naked beside each other in a hotel room. The star opens one girl's legs, and then the other's, for the camera. Both of the girls have shaved, or have been shaved. Then the star pulls the first girl, the blonde, into a sitting position on the edge of the bed and, standing in front of her, forces his cock into her mouth. It is possible that the scene is, to some extent, unacted — the size of his cock forces tears into the girl's eyes.
I tried to rally to the feel of his hand on my leg. But a part of me was still at the dinner, greeting guests in black tie. |
When the actor is finished with her, he turns to the second girl, who has been watching him with the first. He turns her over so that he can fit himself into her from behind; at the same time, another man (he had been lounging in the chair earlier, naked) pulls her on top of him and enters her from the front. While this is going on, the first girl wipes her eyes and breathes with her mouth open as she watches the girl beside her on the bed. After a while, the second girl cries out in Polish.
"The thing about these films," he said, "is that this really happened. We're seeing something that actually really happened."
I tried to rally to the feel of his hand on my leg. But a part of me was still at the dinner, greeting guests in black tie.
"You know why I want to see you with another lover?" he said, watching the screen. "I want to see a secret you — I would trade possession of you for it."
He had offered to bring in women who modeled for him, and I had declined. I knew there was no one he would rather see me with than Katherine.
I thought of the photographs he had taken of me. He had felt the results were not worthy, did not resemble the nature of what was. He said, "They do not convey the trance you occupy during those times, the trance both of us inhabit, one with the other, one on account of the other, during those times."
"So what is seen is not what is felt?" I asked.
He said, "No instrument carried from a prior place could be expected to capture the feelings effected there."
I had already found the photographs he'd taken of others in a portfolio in another part of the loft.
The moment I wished he would turn off the movie, he muted the sound and turned his attention to me. This quality of attention righted things between us.
Then we were all flesh, and all feeling in that flesh. We abided in it, joined and rejoined, distance collapsed.
"Harmony," he whispered.
I said the word back to him.
Harmony sought, harmony required. "No life lost to us," he said.
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