Drunken Angel (9781936740062) (45 page)

“Are you wet enough? Let's see?” I checked. “Yes,” I said. “That's very good. You're almost ready. Don't move.” Returned with two neckties, pulled her hands a little roughly behind her, bound her wrists. Came around to the front of her to examine what I had.

Removed her bra and panties. Stepped back.

There she stood, pinkish white, naked blondness strapped into black high heels, sensual, lovely, to do with as I pleased.

Thank you, sobriety!

 

I climaxed with her two, three, four times a session. When she orgasmed upright her knees folded and she lost the power to stand. Her entire body shuddered, trembled.

Her eyes showed no love at first. They showed mischief, surprise, uncertainty, fear, doubt, greed, authority, submission, admiration, even veneration, but not love. All we did, initially, for several encounters, is have sex, with ropes and spanking integral to our exchange. But by the seventh encounter, all devices fell away. We made straightforward love, which I preferred. Sex the other way, with ropes, cuffs, blindfold, paddles, operating table, rosewater body wash, felt grotesque, preparations for a vestal stag-mag sacrifice to a bloodthirsty newsprint religious fantasy sprung from the masturbating minds of pulp writers long dead and in their graves. Nonetheless, she was the dream of my adolescent libido, the Vargas girl I had prayed to someday have in my Bronx bedroom reveries of future literary fame.

 

A woman introducing herself as Sandra appeared in the café where I wrote one day and struck up a conversation. Short, pretty, with a thick mane of jet-black hair, large breasts, and a slender waist, she came from Texas and made her living as an artist. We arranged to take a stroll through the Botanical Garden. Then I took her to dinner at Le Colonial. After, we went straight to my place. Had no idea what might turn her on. I soon learned.

“I'm into S and M,” she said flat-out, giving barely a glance at my coffee-table quick-reference guide to kink.

“Oh,” I said, acting surprised. I was, in a way. Is this what
happened once you tried it? Candidates appeared? Out came the table. Ropes. Blindfold. Etcetera.

Unlike Pia, Sandra brought out my severity, if not cruelty. She panted gratefully, slavishly, as I undressed her. Stood there blindfolded, hands bound behind, in high heels, my leather belt clasped in her teeth, imploring me to belt her.

Chuckling to myself, I barked: “Down on your knees!”

“Yes, Sir,” she barely garbled out.

I made her crawl on all fours like a dog with the belt in her mouth. Hoisted her onto the table and banged her bluntly, face to face, and dragged her over to an armchair where I sprawled with limbs akimbo as she sucked me off. Then back onto the table with her, splayed, hands and feet secured, a stack of cushions under her little buttocks as I teased her clit with my bobbing tongue, lathered her vaginal lips, one finger hooked into her G-spot, stroking. She wriggled like a fish, had so many orgasms, one after another, that she nearly fainted. She never giggled, joked, or laughed. Called me “Master” with complete seriousness. I half took it seriously myself. Sometimes left her there on the table moaning and writhing and walked into the kitchen to make myself some tea and peruse the day's unopened mail, skim through the week's issue of the
New Yorker
.

She took cabs to my home dressed in fishnet body sleeves, high heels, and a tan belted raincoat. I liked the look. French Existentialist. She also knew more about literature than Pia, who, I was learning, was not especially bright, all pose and seduction but hardly any substance. Pia shelved books but didn't read them. The only literature in her room was copies of
Cosmo
and
Vanity Fair
.

In many ways, Sandra was more fun—demanded nothing and could discourse brightly on almost anything from Dickens to the Cold War. But Pia commanded my full attention. She was the main act—Sandra a sideshow. Hard to say why. In a radical
effort at complete honesty, I told both women about each other. Both claimed not to care. I believed Sandra but not Pia. Sometimes cruelly went down to Pia's studio still smelling of Sandra and entered her. She received my thrusts with a concentration and solemnity that showed me that she knew I'd been with Sandra only minutes before. It was touching. But there was as yet no love in her eyes. And until it was there—and I was, for reasons unknown to me to this day, determined that it would be—I was prepared to hurt her into loving me.

But Pia launched her own campaign to make me jealous. She succeeded. I became like a madman. The truth is, I was in love with her. Once, I caught her embracing a fat pimply man named Erik in front of our building and walked past, indignant, pretending not to see. I couldn't sleep for days after that. Another time, she told me that she was going to a reunion dance at her alma mater and later that evening I saw her well-spanked behind sheathed in an evening gown vanish sparkling into the depths of a black stretch limo parked at the curb. Peering in as I passed, saw a tuxedoed older man in the gloom, waiting. Should have felt amused; was instead outraged.

Sandra, by contrast, never provoked so much as a single snappish remark from me; though she too tried the jealousy route, at all times I was winsome smiles and chuckling pleasantries. Pia had tapped into my central nervous system, and it felt to me like terror. Oddly, my physical pleasure with Pia never equaled that with Sandra—in every way, Sandra was the better lover—but with Sandra there simply wasn't the depth of emotion or even arousal that I experienced with Pia. Pia had a lock on my libido.

When I came in Pia, a world of emotion fueled my ejaculation. There was love, pride, hope, but also hatred, distrust, sheer incomprehension. She ruled my lust like a fickle deity, not really even trying. I was as helpless before her as Van Gogh before nature;
ate her pussy the way Vincent devoured the paints that poisoned and drove him mad. Tried to push her flesh into love, the way Van Gogh tried to make colors perform beyond their capacity.

He succeeded. I failed. In some strange way, she was dead inside. In the way that Van Gogh quite literally painted himself to death, I almost succeeded, with Pia, at killing myself banging her. But where he left behind masterpieces, I produced only suicided spermatozoa and ashen emotions.

 

Sandra left town to spend a weekend in Chicago with an old flame. Would she sleep with him, I wondered aloud. Absolutely not, she said. They were just good friends. I searched my feelings, wondered if I cared one way or another. Didn't.

When she returned, she cabbed over dressed in the usual fishnet body stocking and belted tan raincoat. Seemed a bit distraught, paler than usual, eyes sleepless. Threw her arms around my neck. “I missed you so much!” she announced. Kissed my neck, cheeks, eyes, and we made love, forgoing the table. I went down on her. She tasted funny. The smell different. Alien, another person's.

Lifted my face, a bit dismayed, and said: “You slept with him.” “Yes, Sir,” she said.

“Oh, drop all that Sir stuff! I thought you didn't plan to.”

“I didn't. It was unplanned. Just happened.”

“More than once, I would say?”

“Yes, more than once.”

“Huh!” Came to my feet, retired to an armchair to think. She crawled over and took my member in her mouth, began pulling on it with little kitten mewlings. I let her. Stroked her face. But couldn't rid my mouth and nose of that brassy alien taste. My erection wilted.

“What's wrong?” she asked.

“I don't know. It's strange. But I feel not only a complete lack of jealousy but an equal sexual disgust. I don't want our bodies to touch.”

She froze, tears in her eyes.

“Sweetheart,” I said sincerely, “I don't wish to hurt your feelings. But it feels like there's a third in bed with us, some man, and it turns me off. Turns my stomach, actually.”

She stood up and dressed. “Will you call me a taxi, please?” Said with great dignity.

“Of course.”

 

Now all my focus was on Pia. A mistake. Unknown to me, Sandra had served as a buffer against the feelings that now erupted. I was madly in love with Pia, insanely jealous, and she was in love with me, a condition that I soon learned rendered her monstrous.

AT FIRST, BECAUSE SHE DID NOT ACTUALLY SAY SO, I was able to tell that Pia loved me by a certain doelike gentling of her eyes during sex, each time I penetrated her. Her face softened, grew focused and watchful and sad with pleasure.

To compensate for her new vulnerability, she became workaholic. Pulled long shifts at the job and came home and worked more on her computer. I didn't see her for days at a time.

“You're terrified of chaos,” I said.

“Yes. How do you know?”

“Your strict routine makes no allowance for fun. Work, work, work, and more work.”

“That's not true. I spend time with you.”

“We don't even sleep together. I ball and leave. Or you ball and go. It's more like we're hygiene partners. Getting our biweekly sex. A pedicure for your pussy.”

She laughed. “I like that!”

“Fine with me,” I lied. “But you love me and you're terrified.”

Her liaisons with other men continued. Each time, I swore to leave, and stayed.

Once, at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, by the Martin Luther King waterfall, in a violent display of feeling I berated her as a pathological liar because I had caught her out in a lie. I insisted that she remove a ring I had bought her and hurled it across the grass knolls, sailing over sunbathers' heads and into traffic, where it vanished, crushed under wheels. She wept. I left. Days later, passing her door as I descended the stairs to the lobby, glimpsed her standing at her open door, as if she'd been waiting for me, wearing a look of despair so abject that I next found myself lodged firmly inside her, all thought of desertion gone.

When I mentioned this to my sponsor, he said, simply: “You're addicted to her.”

“How?”

By now, Old Ray had learned the whole sordid score. He leaned forward, hands clasped, lips set in a bemused smile. “You've just told me that everything inside you screams that she's no good for you, yet you can't seem to stay away. Isn't that what happens to the alcoholic around alcohol, the drug addict around drugs? The head telling you to stop even as the bottle goes to your lips and you swallow enough to paralyze ten normal men. And then drink some more. Has the frequency of your sex escalated?”

“Yes,” I admitted, ashamed.

“How often are you having sex?”

“A better question would be, when am I not having sex?”

“Are you seeing friends?”

“No.”

“How's the writing?”

I laughed sadly. “I live to have her.”

“It feels good.”

“Yeah. I guess. Not always.”

“Like drinking. It's not the pleasure that increases but the compulsivity, the frequency, in direct proportion to which the pleasure actually decreases.”

“Oh, shit!” I said solemnly. “You're right! I'm hooked.”

“Just keep in mind,” Old Ray said, “knowing that you're hooked won't necessarily help. You'll know it and still return for more.”

“What will help?”

“Only your Higher Power.”

 

And now ensued an anguish and torment such as I had never experienced except in the throes of my worst PTSD paranoia—somehow even worse, since I had no alcohol or drugs to lessen the pain. This was not terror unfolding in complex patterns of fantastical plots but a mounting wave of inconsolable grief and shame. I cried continually. It must have been some form of nervous breakdown. A mere inquiry after my welfare reduced me to a sobbing, quivering mess of indescribable sorrow. My friends were deeply concerned. No one seemed to understand except Mel, a cab driver acquaintance, who would appear at my door with the cab left running downstairs, drag me out, and haul me, off the meter, to 12-step meetings where I sat in the back rows, an unremarked wall speck unable to hear, see, speak, or think, a raw, exposed nerve ending sensitized to a level of intensity that no human was meant to endure, let alone survive. I swore now that I must not see her.

All of me at every moment hungered to copulate with her, just one more time.

She wouldn't leave me alone. Once came up to me outside her door as I descended the stairs, took me in her arms, and squeezing my buttocks said, smiling lecherously: “We don't have to be in a
relationship just to do this. We can still have our fun.”

I pulled her hands off, left, crushed. Thought that night of sleeping outdoors in the streets. Homelessness beckoned. Madness. Anywhere I walked I scanned streets for outdoor nooks to colonize. Under a stairwell downtown, an alley that looked safe and inviting, a bench in a deserted part of the park. And yet, the one ingredient that would propel me into the gutter for good, alcohol, never even crossed my thoughts. Miraculously, I felt not a single urge to drink, only to die.