Dave told his friend Matt that I'd taken him to a prostitute. Matt asked if it's my turn next — volunteering himself in that case. How gauche! When partaking in swinging, it should never be fully planned — one should remain unsure, right up till the very end, whether one is about to be kidnapped and sex-tortured, or handled all night by four or six capable hands in the normal kinky sex manner, or else dropped off at one's door, unsullied and bored. Matt makes everything sound so . . . wife-swappy. Matt and I have each, separately, been talking so long to Dave about me doing it with Matt, I kind of just want to get it over with — and that, believe it or not, is enticing. Because I'm not concerned with it being good or anything, it's my one and only plan I'm relaxed about right now. The fact that I dislike him only makes me like him more. And his total lack of skill in the free love game is kind of cute — I guess because I know he's so deft in every other department. Still, cute or not, the guy's a sleaze. Oh, I'm all aflutter and indecisive! Matt is buying the mansion of Dave's eccentric aunt who died. Egotist that I am, I half-believe he's doing it just to irritate me. Dave's family is my family now, and the thought of that sonofabitch architect occupying my family's space . . . coming home every evening to my dead aunt's home, surrounding himself with scenes of Venice she painted, sleeping in her bedroom. It makes me feel invaded, my privacy compromised. Plus, it's like he's saying, I'm so-o-o rich, I can pay for a mansion and the renovations. Bastard.
Matt called the other morning while Dave was out. It seemed obscene to have his voice in my ear when I was not quite awake, not dressed or washed. Not even coffeed. I feel extra naked pre-coffee. "This is Dave's friend Matt," he said, and I said back, "Are you my friend?" He paused, and then said carefully, "I don't know if we've had enough contact to qualify us for friendship at this point." Cold. I silently congratulated him: he'd given a right answer for once. I told him his accent wasn't quite as horrible over the phone as in person. He claimed, pedantically, that an accent "cannot be horrible or not, it just is." I answered that if judgments aren't made, everything is loose, and less than it is or could be. Then in an angry rush I added, "Dave will be home in a couple hours, goodbye!"
I hung up feeling like Liz Taylor. Dave came home and we went to a pond that no one knows about. Dave climbed to the tallest rock and dove right in, while I waited on a flat rock with my lotion and a silk dress I didn't feel like taking off and a metal necklace that breaks into pieces if I move too fast. Why did I wear these things to a pond? I don't know. Something in me makes me do everything all wrong. Plus, I was still Elizabeth Taylor. Lazily, Dave moved closer and closer — me warning him all the while about the dress — and finally he splashed me all over with microbe-infested, brackish pond water. And then he lay his wet, slimy body on top of my sweet, clean one.
While Dave was having his way, I tried to pretend he was Matt. I fantasized correcting Matt's grammar and philosophical stances, I imagined just going through the motions of sex, to make him feel sleazy and used and not good. Well, I tried to fantasize that, but Dave's peculiar signature moves — like sawing with his wrist between my legs, and fitting my head between his neck and shoulder — made it impossible. Birds were singing and — I know this sounds queer, but — love rode to me on sunbeams, slanting through the trees, then rose back out of me to return to the forest at different angles.
There is a deep, long, quiet sorrow in love, a pity for all dying things, and an awareness of our own life slipping down. The preciousness of not dying now — not yet, not at all yet — rises up like a halo over the couple, and makes them good. When I come, I understand something I can't explain. It makes me want to cry. Anonymous sex or competitive sex never brings you the awareness of life that comes with love. Bad sex — frenzied, unfriendly, confrontational — is not painful. Loving sex is. Especially when there are rocks under you.
I guess married sex makes everyone feel both safe and trapped. The inability to exit the union with your lover — when you can't even imagine him as someone else — drives home both the possibilities of the flesh and its limitations. On really long walks when it's almost dark, I have often wanted to burst through the sky and get to what's on the other side. I think I'm looking for some perfect, unimaginable union, the one that will happen when (if) I can figure out how to break out of the confines of this body and this time. And then sometimes I have sex and I realize that it's already true — there's no longer a barrier to break down. That's what makes me kind of sad or wistful, because then, what's left to hope for?
I just know I wouldn't be bothered with any of these thoughts if it were Matt ruining my dress.
