Darling –
CANDY
You think the gore isn’t possible to show? Like what about the porn? You think they are worrying like you worry in the porn shoots?
ME
Possibly not –
CANDY
I don’t mean you do the normal shots like women going into a shower. You want it like the porn moguls would like it –
ME
Hey, why not just starve all the extras?
CANDY
Now I like that. There’d probably be regulations but you are getting this, Toto. You are beginning to think intelligent –
And after all, this was one reason why I always loved the erotic home movies that are now available everywhere, I loved them because they showed everything there was, right down to the smallest bedroom ornament, the My Little Pony collection and sports medals, they couldn’t help it – at last there is this art form where not everything is artistic, where chance is an element of the absolute design. In films things happen and you do not cut away, or at least that’s what you want in an ideal movie, whereas in TV people cut away just when you want them to linger most of all, like all the execs are in some small cabal to frustrate all your noble instincts. And yet despite this tough-guy wildness that Candy taught me, I would also say that in our life together Candy had this gift for somehow not seeing things as they were. From our suffering she turned away, so that here we were in some increasingly harmful setting and something vast was not being said. But perhaps that’s normal. We tried to see the good in each other and wanted it to be true and in some way therefore it was, however imperfect it seemed. For obviously, despite our grandest efforts, there was still a doubt in Candy. She wanted and did not want to believe me, in this period when I often disappeared, or was preoccupied, or silent. I could see this in her. I knew that what she was saying to me was: Please do not become a monster. Please do not do the harmful things. I want to believe in your existence as a moral being. What else would any wife want? Very much therefore she wanted to think that everything could be explained by the sadness of my unemployment, rather than other loves, and I think in fact that she was right, that my behaviour was indeed much more explained by a sadness than any delinquency with Romy or with Hiro, and therefore this offer to join in here was perhaps a test, the way a knight was tested in the old stories. And if it was such a test, I wanted to pass it with courage. So to please her and to explain that really I would love her for ever I continued to lick at Romy while Candy lay back and watched. If it was gruesome it was no more gruesome than the rest of life, I was telling myself. Most of the time we are not saying the reasons why nothing should happen, why everyone should sit tight in their space bubble and let themselves be whirled around the sun. There are false positions in every moment of your day, when you are not telling someone about their untenable tattoo or you are telling your ex-boyfriend that absolutely one day you will travel together to Tahiti, just as friends, although you know that never will such a voyage occur but he seems so totally sad and lonely even six months after you left him. I just mean: up in the air there are planes taking business people to meetings that are doomed because their business partner is in fact corrupt, and also wives are travelling to be reunited with their unfaithful husbands. That’s just an average day in this small planet’s stratosphere.
by what is visible & what is not
Elsewhere the room was marked by an awkward messiness, the horizontal problem of chair legs and lamp cables, and I was sad when I had to think how awkward bodies can look when there isn’t a civilised amount of room. Sure, there were possibly only nine people involved, but still, the basic feeling was that everything was everywhere entangled. A girl was just lying there being licked between the legs while idly toying with a penis that had been offered to her hand, but her head was resting on some popzines and I worried for her neck. The question of common hygiene also worried me but I knew that if I raised this with for instance Candy she’d just dismiss it as even more uncool than usual, so I dismissed it on her behalf. I’m just saying that a lot of thoughts and counterthoughts were occurring in this time, so many that it turned out I needed the orgy for distraction, and so I watched, like it was television – if television had become something extreme and also malevolent. Because now what had happened was that Epstein had returned to our group, after getting a glass of water. He lay down beside my wife and they were talking in the manner of old friends, but this time old friends who are naked, which of course was what they were, and he was nuzzling at her neck, and as he did so I could see his penis sort of just gently move and rise in this slow fashion, and it was painful, to see this happen and not to be able to do anything, to have to accept this as the price you must pay for your ideals. And I was aware, not totally, just slightly – kind of like when you’re trying to reach for a dream when you wake up, or for the ping-pong ball when it’s been smashed off the table and it’s squirming away in spirals – that if I looked like I was happy with this new state of affairs, then it would have one good effect which would be that it would very much serve to show Candy that in this orgy I was not possessive of or focused on Romy. It would show me to be a libertine of absolute unimpeachable openness. For Epstein was looking also at Romy and they were smiling, and sadly I watched them watch each other. Everyone was exchanging these looks and glances to reassure each other that something drastic wasn’t occurring, whereas of course this scene was drastic, absolutely. And yet perhaps it wasn’t, after all, if we could still smile. Never had I felt so much tenderness and painfulness coexisting. Always I had wanted a troupe, I was trying to tell myself. It had been Candy and Hiro and me, and now here we were, extending it into vaster regions, like discovering the estates and empires of the moon. Romy leaned forward over Epstein and I could observe the tendons in her armpit and the way the skin of her breasts where it met her ribcage seemed so thin and fragile, and such delicacy made me want to cry out with love, but I didn’t, I tried to remain outside myself instead, and one way I could do this was by thinking about the smell, since something I don’t think I’d ever imagined if I’d ever thought about an orgy, which I must admit was rarely, was that the smell of many people having sex was obviously the same as just two people having sex, but multiplied, and this was sometimes disgusting and sometimes alluring, depending on your mood: it was deep and vegetal and enclosing, like being in a hothouse among tendrils with condensation on the glass. Then Romy was letting Candy sit over her face and it was a very delicate thing, the way Candy was holding herself there, very intently, you could see that it was a pleasure but also painful to remain in that position. Or Romy was sucking Epstein’s penis and just occasionally she’d minutely gag, which made me worried for her but then also I was thinking it must presumably be nice in some way, the choking sensation, or at least a pain that was part of the pleasure, or why else would anyone do it? Then I was looking sideways at Candy to see what she was thinking but she didn’t seem to be thinking anything. She was just narcotically relaxed and I was happy to see her happy – and however sad I was inside myself I did have this vision in front of me that I had to admit had happiness in it, for in this orgy it seemed to be being demonstrated that there were as I always wanted to believe other models for people to be with each other, there could be a sort of caring that was almost impersonal and very sweet. Perhaps therefore Hiro was right, that such small adjustments to reality could create much more interesting and pleasurable scenarios. Or in fact, whether or not I agreed with him, I reflected, it didn’t really matter, it did not affect how Hiro existed in the world: he was just there, the way wind is in a wind tunnel. Just as so for instance here he was, in front of us. He handed Candy and me an ice cream each.
— Let me, said Hiro, — for once in my life have the presence of mind displayed by the hero of that movie who in the middle stopped and said: I just want to let you know that being here is one of the pleasures of my life.
Then he walked away again. Hiro was hyper like a genki drink. And tha
t, I think, was how the tropical confusion began.
with potentially dark consequences
For afterwards, it was delicate – like it’s always delicate after the first time you’ve had sex or at least just touched another person, but now exaggerated. It was that type of momentous thinking when future possibilities are now in the air, ludicrous like demons, or rather that you yourselves are the demons, flapping around in your stale and outsize costumes. I think I knew that none of us was exactly invulnerable or impervious to feelings, and that if this was happening then we should undertake some responsibility to try to prevent the tragic consequences. But that knowledge was so far away, like the merest lighthouse in the distance. So that however much I was aware – as Romy began to lick my by now quite tired penis while very gently cupping my balls in her warm hand, in a way that I felt was her mute method of reassuring me, and failing, that something other than playfulness was happening – that we had put ourselves in this situation where everyone was at risk, I could not pause and consider the question why. And if a story was taking on more elements than I expected, who was I to stop it? If things were leaking everywhere, my only duty was to examine the leak with care – whether or not I was the agent of catastrophe. I kind of thought I wasn’t. I tended to see Hiro as the impresario in this case, although perhaps to find an impresario or a first cause is not important or even possible. Then a friend of a friend who was naked apart from a pair of ski boots wandered over and asked for a light. Her name could have been Gryphon or Maria or Kayley or something similar. I searched in my slumped jeans on the floor because I was glad to be busy with something that wasn’t sexual and meanwhile she kept talking.
— It’s been the worst comedown of my life, for like three days? she said. — My immune system’s just this tiny piece of paper? I mean it’s like I’m not myself any more?
That was the dialogue that was normal among my friends, with that whole offness and bizarrerie. In fact offness was the total territory we inhabited. That’s the tone I think I’m doomed to record.
3. LOWDOWN, CLUMSY, SLY, UNDERHANDED
HAPPINESS IS POSSIBLE BUT DIFFICULT
leading to rumours of libertine exploits
The rumours that then circulated about our little band were gothic and other genres – the noir, the skin flicks, the hammer schlock – until eventually I answered my phone and there Shoshana was. What shit is going on? Shoshana would say, or one of those Fed-like questions. She wanted me to know what was being said – that we all slept together in the same bed; that we liked to sleep all day then spend the nights doing acid in some sexually combinatory situation; or that we would turn up at parties and instigate crazy effects that left people shaken and disgusted. It was also being said that I was becoming a part-time dealer, including various prescription and non-prescription drugs, with a sideline in web entertainments where Romy and Candy had sex, or Hiro and I would do anything we were asked by an online ensemble of paying spectators. Other people could swear that they had seen Candy at parties with her arms covered in bruises, or wearing handcuffs to which only I had the key. And of course, everyone, signore, is the subject of rumours, everyone exists as this series of misinformation and stories in the minds of others, this is what everyone knows all the time, but to discover that, to know it for real – well, that is an unusual fate which is usually only the merited preserve of the celebrity. To be notorious or scandalous in any way distressed me very much – not that I could deny, however, that such rumours corresponded with a certain new freedom in my way of life. To have been part of such a group activity seemed to have extended the basic thinking – this discovery that things I might have feared like orgies or infidelity in full view of my wife could happen as pristinely as the way avocados existed, or the postal system. I had finally realised that whereas I thought I was simply standing in the garden, among verdant streams and widespread birds, I had in fact pushed open a door and discovered the general abattoir, and everywhere there was gore staining the furniture and my delicate hands.
that are in fact more domestic
And so I continued to descend the minor scale – even if it felt like I was moving the other way, in bright ascending arpeggios. In this new atmosphere where I began to articulate myself more freely, my pleasures became more baroque, like some cathedral with its death heads encrusted in the stone, and candles in smeared jars. With Romy I was now much less circumspect and reserved. For if once again we had slept together, and in the presence of my wife, it was as if an ancient interdiction had been lifted, and so we sought each other out more often, and it was difficult to stop this. But what I want to emphasise is that also now at home the actions between myself and Candy became more feverish, as if in instigating this orgy Hiro had demonstrated how easy it was to fulfil the simplest fantasy. There was this thing we had where Candy would sit there on the toilet, and begin to piss, but first of all she did this very shyly, like it wasn’t easy for her to be so abandoned and she needed to concentrate, she needed to shut her eyes or look away and sometimes it never happened, sometimes I never did hear that gentle sound begin from under her like a mountain tarn but when it did then she would take my penis in her mouth – because I was there, standing in front of her, waiting – and it undid me, it was so gentle, and so messy. Nor would this kind of exploit have continued if Candy had not been very happy too – because while she has always been this person of grave intellect and serious mien, she never wanted the absolute married existence. It was Candy who had encouraged me to ask my parents if Hiro could stay. Like me, she had ideals of a more expansive existence, and I think for her this had its very precise political dimension – for why should any woman be defined or limited? She was wild precisely in proportion to the absolute repression she wanted to refuse. And I know that nowadays the combinations of girl and boy are so infinite it’s sometimes confusing and depressing and hurtful, but also surely it can be delightful, the new combinations of what’s normal and what’s marvellous? Our domestic tone, if there was a tone, was something like Ominous Funk. For while earlier I would not have contemplated, say, hitting Candy in bed or slapping her breasts, I was now so assiduous in my attention to her that something had changed between us. Now a savagery or violence was among us. Everything with Candy and the bedroom was newly gorgeous and ornate and yet even here I was troubled because to do such things in privacy with Candy seemed in some way to be an injustice towards Romy. Such spirals! Such innocence! That is what you wanted, Mama and Papa, when you sent me to my secluded school, by a lake, in a forest, with many therapists and cooks? For there was this one time when uncertainly or tentatively at least I twisted one of Candy’s nipples, and she gasped at me. I twisted more.
— Hurt me, said Candy. — Like really, totally.
And that was how I discovered this kink in my soul. It came from Candy, not from me. A kink? said Wyman when I got drunk and told him. That’s just a kink? Well, sure, I replied. Because when she had said this I was looking in her eyes and meanwhile everything about me was getting more excited. I don’t mean just my penis, although sure I mean my penis, I mean also my stomach and lungs and heart, I mean my nervous system. It was the excitement when you make a major discovery. So that in the weeks that followed Candy’s cry of pleasure in her own pain, while my mother and my father sat downstairs at breakfast, eating their cereal, letting the coffee percolate, we would be upstairs where I would be tying her up with some rope I had bought in a ship’s merchant in the city (a course of action I would not recommend to those easily susceptible to embarrassment, since it is difficult in such a ship’s merchant to order only for instance a metre or so of rope without looking not at all like the tousled mariner you are trying to impersonate, but rather, as indeed you are – so perhaps it is no longer a case of impersonation, for if you are a thing then how can you resemble it? – the sexually deviant dauphin your parents have developed). And then I slapped her and hit her – although skilfully, so that my parents would not hear – until there were bruis
es on her arms and legs, and forced my penis in her while she turned her head from side to side. Or sometimes I would simply tie her to the bed and leave her while I breakfasted downstairs, engrossed in the conversation of my mother and my father. But mostly we would find ways to do this anywhere else, in the bathrooms of friends, or hidden by walls in public places, in the unisex toilets of museums: for who after all would want to be fucked in bed, like the mother of a family? And I should say: I did find these longings very arduous. I have grown up only wanting to do justice to the women around me. In the films I watch, I try very hard to watch an equal list of films by men and women, even if that’s not easy to maintain. But if your wife wants you to hit her, in the breasts, and grasp her nipples very tight until she makes some noise or moue that very possibly means pain, then is it wrong to do this? I don’t think it can be, and therefore I felt no remorse, were it not for a remorse at this very lack of remorse, because I could understand how this might be seen in other scenarios, that I was in this situation being the old-fashioned man. And I really did not want that to be true, that I would be as male in my desires as my father’s generation, for although my father is a gentle man I find his friends very dispiriting, with their desires for women that only encompassed possession and disdain. But I think what was happening was much sweeter. Many people think we have it good, the children of my era, all milkshake and ice cream, but the atmosphere in general was grisaille and snow, like there had been a putsch and all of us were the worried chinovniks in the ruins of the winter palace system. I had friends who lived in threesomes but they didn’t do it any more. I had friends who tried to live exactly as rabbinically Orthodox as their parents but that made them desperate too. The stories of the freakouts of my friends, these tended to be now finished. We might as well each morning have sat down for tea and fresh xiao long bao. So that if now in this period where no employment was in sight I had happened on this secret abandon, well, who was I to resist? There Candy would sit, at her dressing table, doing her email in her bra and knickers, with her hair in a band so that later she could wash her face, or let the moisturiser sink in, and it was this very calmness and security and efficiency that made me eager to unravel her. Naturally therefore there were miasmal smells. But just as my mother had always ignored my thefts and implausuble stories, so she ignored what was happening now. And it was very useful, this silence, when considering the fact that on our sheets there was now often blood and semen and sometimes urine, which my mother cleared up without advertisement, with just as much carefulness as she showed for our carpets or our clothes.
Lurid & Cute Page 10
