Saline Solution (19 page)

opposed to lick or bite.'

'Is that good?' she said, her mouth still full.

'Anything is good,' I answered, 'so long as it's contrasted with its opposite.' She was bent like a yoga instructor in an esoteric pose. Her cunt winked out from between her buttocks. 'I wish we had another man now,' I said. 'Look at that. An entire erogenous zone going unused.'

'Well, if you can find one within the next few days, bring him around,' she said. 'After the abortion I won't be able to fuck for a month.' She looked as thoughtful as a woman could with a cock nudging her lips. 'I haven't gone that long without fucking for fifteen years.'

'Fuck a lot, do you?' I asked.

'Twenty-five men in the last six months before I met you. But I was tired of fucking men. I do it with you because I'm used to you.'

'If I had my way,' I said, 'I mean, if it were physiologically possible, I would fuck about forty per cent of all the women I see. Worldwide that would make about half a billion women. Assuming that all of them would want to fuck me, but I'm not going to let such a dismaying reality intrude on my fantasy.'

'You bastard,' she said, 'don't let any
reality
intrude on your precious fantasies.'

'That's all words anyway. Here is something else.' I moved back and inserted my cock into her cunt. We began a very odd fuck. It is impossible to describe its rich ambiguities without destroying the memory of its fragile strength in my mind. It's too hard to write about that.

After the dissipation of the seventh wave, the cresting of the sex and emotion that makes for orgasm, I realised that I wasn't going to ejaculate and I simply didn't have the stamina to keep us both reaching for the next climax. I tore loose from the magnetic interlock of cock and cunt and threw myself on my knees at the edge of the bed where her arse now hung half over. My mouth and tongue went immediately to work on her slippery cunt lips, now the texture of well-polished, well-used leather.

As I started to speak that most ancient of languages, the marriage of touch, movement, and poetry, the phone rang. I thought it was Janet and for an instant a picture of the party flashed on my inner eye. I was impelled to answer. On the third ring, I ripped my mouth away from Lucinda's body and stomped to the phone. It was Bertha. I listened as her thin voice informed me that they would not come to the movies with us that evening. I suddenly remembered we had a tentative date. I almost choked with chagrin. I spat out a few words to maintain the absolute minimum level of politeness, and then I hung up. I stormed back to Lucinda, who hadn't moved. 'That bitch! That dirty little rip-off artist! It was Bertha,' I screamed.

'I thought it might be,' said Lucinda, 'but you're never sure, are you?' she said.

'And did you see how she stole that parking place from me that day?' I sat down and put my finger in Lucinda's cunt. She started to twist her body around them. But I stopped. Too many conflicting emotions were bubbling through me. 'Let's smoke a joint and relax before we begin fucking again,' I said. She shrugged her shoulders. 'O.K.' she said.

We smoked in silence for a while.

She looked good. She had dyed her hair earlier in the day and it now sloped down in wide fuzzy triangles on each side of her head. It was a rich brown. The night before she had stayed up for five hours after I fell asleep, reading, crying, thinking about murder and suicide. It never got too freaky, but it was a bummer for her. I had been dismantled to hear her tell of it. 'Shit,' I thought, 'here comes the messy part. Watching the chick come to pieces.' And I felt an obligation to help her through whatever her changes were, even though I realised that my being there just made matters worse. Classic bind.

But by the next day she was gay again, and flirting with the house painter next to the elevator. 'Maybe I should become a dyke,' she said then. 'What do you think, doctor?'

'I think it's a great idea,' I said. 'For one thing, with a woman you could have sex and friendship all wrapped up in one person, something that's almost impossible with most men. And if the two of you had no jealousy, you could still have male lovers when you were in the mood for cock. In fact if the two of you got it together, you could bring men over and put them through enough changes to pay back all the low-life motherfuckers like me you have ever known.'

With that she leaned over and kissed me on the cheek in the most friendly and peaceful manner possible. 'You've never lived with a man, have you?' she said. 'I mean, as a lover.'

'No,' I said.

'Why not?'

I thought about it. 'I was afraid people would think I was queer,' I said, and Lucinda laughed, because the way I said it, it came out like a joke. But what I meant to say was, 'Because / might think I was queer.'

Now I took her again, and lodged my body into hers at a thirty degree angle, supporting myself on my hands. At once I had the sense of the openness of her. She shook her head and rolled over, presenting her back to me. I entered her from behind, but with the sense of going in from the front. I realised that a cunt is open from either direction. To a hole, there is no front or back. Any place on the periphery is equal to any other. And there was a nice balance between us. I felt her sucking at my cock with her entire body, and I was aware that she understood how I was digging her reactions as much as my own sensations. It wasn't the glorious sense of
us
which marks the classic transcendental fuck. This was a one-to-one, with a great measure of respect for one another's privacy. After all, the relationship was over. I didn't want to cop out through misrepresenting the significance of the sexual act. Lucinda and I could fuck as deeply as we wanted to, but it must remain clear that this was not the merging of two lovers hustling towards some ultimate come.

It became an oddly homosexual fuck. I screwed her in the cunt the way I would take a man in the arse. And so the criterion became depth of penetration coupled with sensitivity to nuance of touch. I pushed her knees forward so she crouched like a frog, and I fucked her for almost twenty minutes. Much of it was simply loosening up the soil, getting all the stretchy pouch of her cunt supple.

Then I felt her push out, almost as though she were trying to expel me; but it was actually a reaching, a gaping pouting of the cunt lips. I got all the way into her. She was holding nothing back.

I exploded into her inner cunt, and felt my energy penetrating up as far as the third chakra. I fucked her in the spine.

I lost all self-consciousness at the orgasm. It just scraped the balls of heaven clean.

Coming and coming and coming. Each thrust a coming. Each moment an endlessness at the point of edge of coming. Into you now, my lady, so deep into you that I am fucking myself, myself. And the cunt is the secret smile of God.

The ringing phone cascaded in waterfalls of associations and sounds down the blinkings of my waking mind. It was from Janet. 'Please come to the party,' she said. 'Go ahead,' said Lucinda. 'We've fucked. You don't have to try to be noble anymore. Go ahead,' she said as she saw my consternation, 'I'll be all right, really.'

I walked down the garbage-can-lined darkness of Amsterdam Avenue. Puerto Ricans stood under lampposts, cats scurried from car to car like guerrillas seeking cover, and the police patrols stunned the people with their pointed presence. I went into straight paranoid overdrive. I stepped fully into my fear and became bathed in alertness. Suddenly I felt a sweet surge of joy and exultation. Here where a thick stench of brutality turned the concrete black, I was alive, and prowling, and moving from danger to danger through danger, swinging through the physicality of the New York night, from the limb of Lucinda's gurgling mouth and shouting
cunt
to the tree house where the acid monkeys were celebrating the triumph of chaos.

Walking into the house was like stepping into a sauna. Waves of acid vibrations, everyone bright-eyed and frantic for flow, but no one able to manage anything but jagged rhythms. I fell in and out of everyone's basket, surf-riding on the astral plane. The immense potential of humanity staggered me. This was the life force, this was the fantastic energy that is locked in the species, and this is what the dictators of all time have suppressed. This is what the people themselves fear, and so lapse into willing conformity, painting themselves grey, making themselves wrinkled.

I burst through the room like a comet and soared into the backyard. Up above, stars, perpetually mocking my conclusions. I threw myself down into the dirt of Janet's garden and gnawed on the base of a small tree. 'He's fallen on hard times,' said John, standing over me.

Lucinda appeared. 'I decided to come after all. I'm jealous of the dirt.' She sat on my back and I walked off on all fours, she riding me like a child playing horse. 'Very Fellini,' said someone as I moved past.

I crawled past the couples, the fucking couples, the cocksucking cunteating couples, the eternal couples seeking release from completion. The
I Ching
ends with Before Completion. The face of a thin black girl swam before me, her mouth wrapped around a thick white cock, her eyes heavily lidded, as she swooned in that rapturous world between inner and outer experience. I dropped my cock from my zipper and mounted her from behind. Lucinda hit me on the buttocks with a belt. I went on like that. Ululating sisterbrothers emerging into stains and creases in the fabric, the cunning conundrums of our gibbering want.

It was time to leave. She was dressed in velour and gold buckles. We called for quiet as the old man of the mime and his wanton stole past the creaking van of innocent sin. As we passed they fell like phantoms into the concrete reality of the time-speckled departure. And only love was left to wing its widewarped cry into the final night which falls into whimpering awareness of the ultimate of ultimates inexplicably grinning in paroxysms of objective evil dangling from its fragile cord.

Back at the apartment I placed a mirror by the bed and lay back while Lucinda gave me head. She was pure object reflected in the glass, an anonymous source of sensation. I was snuffing out the last twitches of human affection between us. After I left, I didn't want either of us to mourn. It would be better if we died now, in one another's presence.

Her throat went slack and she stopped struggling against my deep slides into her mouth. She gagged, and then gagged again, and finally threw up the cheese and grape juice she had had two hours earlier. It ran down her cheeks and onto the bed. And still I fucked her until I had injected the sperm into her gullet.

It was the day the Arabs blew up jetliners into shining pieces on the desert and men with shotguns were ordered to fly in all the planes.

I pulled out of her mouth and we both lay there breathing to ourselves. A voice rumbled from a window across the alley. Strange realities vibrated. The war would never end.

The purple stain soaked into the sheets. The symbol and the deed ran neck and neck towards the realisation.

XV

What is sex without the games for which it serves as a vehicle?

The next afternoon I ran into Felix, an old lover, in Central Park. We were both doing some uninteresting cruising, and the meeting was coincidental. I felt no real sexual vibration from him, but his presence was not unpleasant, so I walked with him awhile. We talked of past days and mutual acquaintances, and within five minutes I knew I would be going home with him. I found that he offered me a vague sort of comfort. Several years earlier he and his lover-roommate, Donald, had lived in a loft which faced the back window of my apartment. We had flirted across the alley, and soon I was visiting them twice a week for threesomes, and occasionally, when I felt a touch of preference for one of the other, timing my phone calls with when I could see that whoever I wanted to fuck was home.

We had some wine, now, and brought ourselves quickly up to date.

'Donald is leaving for California,' he said.

'Ah,' I said, 'finally going home.'

I saw him then, living behind his sister's bookstore in the shadow of Disneyland, becoming more wan, more fey, until he ultimately settled into type. I found myself taking my shoes off, and as though on signal, Felix got up to draw the curtains. He opened the couch into a bed, and we got undressed, each paying not too much attention to the other. We were entering into an act that was more like a contest, a match of strengths and softness.

He had a small cock, and a wiry body. His fucking was usually frantic, and he would work himself into such a state of surface excitement that he was often incapable of coming. As usual, I began by having him lie back and relax, and then began a long slow journey with my mouth from his navel to his cock. I sucked him a long time, aware of the communion in the touch. But as he began reaching levels of deeper pleasure/pain, feeling simultaneously the throbbing yang of sex and the poignant yin of death, his pelvis began to twitch and soon he was pumping his cock into my mouth with the spastic motions of a dog fucking a bitch. For me it was exciting, until he reached a certain point and his energy began to ebb. We both knew then that he wouldn't come. I became disgruntled, and he got up.

'I think I have a popper,' he said.

He brought it back with an inhalator, holding out to me with a look of painful begging. Obviously he needed me to solve his dilemma. Being an experienced woman, I realised that he was jaded, that is, he got his rocks off on the symbol of what he was doing, not the actuality. My problem was to provide him with an environment in which he could soar into the upper reaches of his fantasy life while remaining unencumbered on the physical plane. But there was a catch. I had to
mean
what I was doing. That was what the drug was for, to give me a temporary rush of energy sufficient to authenticate my act.