Of the six months we were together, I can remember
doing it only four times: Once
in the front seat of his friend's BMW in the parking lot of a military
building in Germany. Once on the roof deck of a bathhouse. Once on a
jagged rock in the middle of — what was it, a lake or a marsh? — something
you wouldn't want to swim in unless your sole purpose was to paddle out
to the sharp rock in the middle of it to fuck. And once on the bare floor
of an abandoned stone cottage in the middle of the French countryside.
We had sex countless other times, but only four times were worth recounting,
if not reliving.
Antoine and I met when I was nineteen and studying for a semester
abroad in Strasbourg, France. At that point, I had slept with only two people and
proudly possessed the moral fortitude of an eighty-year-old nun. I didn't
believe in sex without love, or without a panoply of blood work, for that matter.
I was my own walking, talking health-class filmstrip. My experience with sex had always
been
beautiful
and
enriching,
the
kind
that
inspires people to write
songs for Celine Dion.
Upon arriving in Strasbourg, I was assigned to a host family
of four. A single mother, her two teenage daughters — one slightly older
than I, one slightly younger — and her son, Antoine, who was in his early
twenties. All the kids had different last names, and I heard random stories
about them growing up naked in the woods, eating bark and making their own clothes.
The mother slept on the couch in the living room, while the three kids shared
a room; they used the empty bedroom to house foreign students for
income.
The girls were of little interest to me; mostly they dressed
up in my clothes and wore their own funny scarves around the house. But there
was something about Antoine. He woke up some mornings and, for no reason, put
on
a
three-piece
pinstriped suit with wingtips and a fedora, then went
about his day, which consisted of smoking three packs of cigarettes and being
a feckless loser.
Antoine was just shy of six feet tall and thin with a classically
Alsacian complexion: light eyes, medium-brown hair that insinuated blondeness,
ruddy cheeks that made him look like he'd just come in from the cold.
He was beautiful in the way I always thought the young gay
lover of an old French painter would be: his delicate features were vaguely feminine
and his ass could have been chiseled out of stone. I'm certain he was aware
of how handsome he was, although he took advantage of his beauty by completely
dismissing it. One night I came home after midnight to find him in the bathroom
with the door ajar, shaving his head to the skin on a whim. Antoine didn't make
a particularly attractive bald guy - in fact, his hair was lovely. But he amplified
his physical appeal by rejecting its trappings.
He sniffed out a sexual lassitude in her that mirrored
his, like how two blind people find each other. |
Antoine came and went very much at his leisure — sometimes he would
be gone for days without explanation, although I suspected he was shacking
up with some dirty Française — and had trouble holding onto a
job. His mother, Marie, worked day and night at the health-food
store below the apartment for minimum wage and insisted that Antoine, being
twenty-three, had to pay rent if he wanted to continue living there. For
this, he swore at her, then ignored her, treating
her like his sisters and all other women: charming them only for what he needed;
for all else, they were an afterthought.
I was no exception. Antoine paid me little mind, except to
regard me as a novelty (how entertaining it must have been for him
to have someone around whose French was poorer than his own!). He often made
a point of telling
a joke
to
his friends in my presence: "What
do you call someone who speaks three languages? Tri-lingual. What do you call
someone who speaks
two languages? Bi-lingual. What do you call someone who speaks one language? Americain." (The
real punch line? Antoine didn't know a single word outside of his mother
tongue.)
Away from the apartment, I studied French at the university.
There, I befriended a woman named Ariel. She was a student of my home college
in the states, but it took a 6,000-mile trip across the world for us to meet.
Ariel came to the apartment a few times to hang out or pick me up, and I soon
discovered that she was stealing away to give Antoine blowjobs in the bathroom.
I could
only guess that he had sniffed out a certain sexual lassitude in her that mirrored
his, like how two blind people or two drug addicts find each other.
This rattled me, although I was loath to admit it. I did, however,
appreciate all the information Ariel provided me about him: huge cock, uncircumcised,
never made a peep
when he came. She got sick of him after about the third mouthful and silently
ended the affair. He
never mentioned her to me, or pried me for information:
I got the distinct feeling that in his mind, she never even existed.
This made Antoine an alluring challenge. If Ariel
couldn't
leave an impression on him with a blowjob, could I do it by attracting, then
rejecting him?
I certainly didn't need — and
didn't
want — to have
sex with Antoine. I had a moral high
ground
to
uphold, not to mention a boyfriend waiting back home. Plus, Antoine was my
host brother, was
bound
to have
hepatitis, and had deposited DNA into a friend of mine. And I hated him.
But it soon became apparent that ignoring him was having no
effect. Against
my
better
judgment,
I
started seeking out
his
company. On
a whim, I took Antoine to my favorite café, the one with the chick bartender
who
smoked
a
pipe and kept a parrot behind the bar that whistled French music slightly off
tune. We sat at a booth in the back corner, the one I considered to
be "mine," in the way only a teenager could possibly claim something in a
place she'd only been to a handful of times. After two or five beers and several
hundred shared cigarettes, he politely asked me for a kiss. So that was
his strategy, I thought. To be respectful and charming, the prick.
So I kissed
him. A few minutes later, I
discovered
that public dry humping is not looked down upon in France.
The dashing Frenchman, with the tongue that invented kissing,
seducing the innocent Americaine: it was just too
trite and offensive, like
something out of the teenage remake of Dangerous Liaisons. Unfortunately,
I played my part of the young Selma Blair all too well.
Every time I sucked
Antoine's dick, I thought only of Ariel and the
innumerable others who had, doubtless, been there before me. His
penis stank from lack of bathing and excess of foreskin; I had to give him
a thorough handjob in the bathtub before I could put it near my mouth.
Ariel was right; he gave no indication of climax other than his
musky ejaculate.When, eventually, Antoine stopped coming outside
of me and started coming inside of me, there were many times I had
absolutely no awareness that
he had come at all. This struck me as being slightly pathological: what circumstances
would cause someone to consistently suppress his orgasm? Maybe he started
having sex in a room next to his mother's and didn't want to give himself
away. Or
perhaps it was a European thing — a measure of restraint in the most
hedonistic moment. I liked to think, though, that he just didn't want to
give anyone the
satisfaction of knowing they had played a small part in his pleasure.
I kept sleeping with him, all
the while disliking us both more
and more. |
Two weeks from the night he mounted me at the café, I let him
fuck me in his mother's house. The kissing wore me down, if you must know; his
tongue in my mouth made all the bones in my body go slack.
I thought that if his oral skills were any indication, the sex would be unparalleled.
As it turns out, it was very much paralleled. The passion leading
up to the act belied the act itself, which seemed rote, as if each thrust had
been factory-installed. We usually did it with him impersonally poised on top
of me, except for the time in the car (driver's seat, physical impossibility)
and the time at the bathhouse. I'd had sex in a car once before, in the back
seat, parked by a lake with my high school sweetheart. It was a little cramped,
but rather charming. The BMW in the German military parking lot with Antoine
was slightly less so. The next day, I had bruises on my shin and back from the
emergency brake and steering column. I'm no stranger to rough sex, but this seemed
more desperate than hot. I wasn't getting banged up because it was part of the
desired vibe; Antoine didn't care about my comfort, and I didn't want to readjust
my position for fear of prolonging sex more than necessary.
The bathhouse was particularly novel, if only because everyone
else was naked. It occurred to Antoine that fucking on the roof deck would be
totally sympa: if anyone walked by, we could just pretend I was sitting on his lap. The physical act was just as unfulfilling on that roof as it was everywhere else with Antoine, but I got off on the fact that I was nailing a French guy in a public place. Antoine and I never talked while we were doing it, never gazed longingly into each other's eyes. I usually just tried to get him to come as efficiently as possible while taking in the scenery. The location was always a consolation prize.
Now, I realize there was no chance I'd ever enjoy sex
with Antoine. But at the time, I continued our relationship, determined to prove
to myself that I had done the right thing. In the past, my feelings for lovers
had
always
grown stronger the more intimate we became — I thought the same would hold
true
for Antoine.
He started telling me that he loved me, which I can only
assume was a lie. I told him I loved him too, which was definitely a lie, but
also an attempt to make myself feel better about the affair. I'm not
having
unsatisfying
sex with someone I hate because I'm too afraid to admit I made a mistake . .
. no,
we're in love!
So in love, in fact, that Antoine felt entitled to read my
journal
and scream at me about a passage that featured his name alongside those of three
other men. Mind you, Antoine
couldn't read a word of English and was indicting me solely on the presence
of his name in a paragraph. Then he became indignant when I
brought up the issue of my privacy: wasn't it
his right to investigate a disloyal salope?
I told myself that I was leaving France in a month and should
just keep up appearances so things wouldn't get uglier. I could
fly home and never speak to him again. So I kept sleeping with him, all
the while disliking both of us more
and more.
At the airport, we both cried; he
because
he
was losing someone to yell at and fuck, and I because my relief just happened
to
come out in liquid form. However, my escape was brief. Antoine decided
to
visit
me
in
America
a couple of months later. I could not,
if my life depended on it, explain why I agreed to receive him. We fought the
entire
time; the visit culminated with him breaking my apartment window.
Not even then, when I actually had some concerns for my physical well-being,
was I able to tell him to go to hell. It was as if he had taken from me the ability
to do anything in character. I hardly recognized myself.
It wasn't until Antoine was safely back in France that I managed
to break it off with him. Even then, it was a pussy's farewell. I just stopped
answering his phone calls. Actually, I stopped answering the phone altogether
for about a month.
Antoine was the first and last person I've had
sex with whom I didn't care for. In retrospect, I don't believe those four
memories I keep of him are arbitrary: they all feature me being driven into
hard, unforgiving surfaces, wishing I had listened a little harder to my inner
health-class
filmstrip. It's the one in which something wretched happens when
you give up what's true about yourself in pursuit of something you don't really
want
in
the
first place. n°
| ABOUT THE AUTHOR: |
 |
J.B. Rabin lives in Oregon where she writes
lying down in her cowboy pajamas. |
©2004 Jennifer
Rabin and Nerve.com
|
