Full Frontal Fiction

by Jack Murnighan

  She takes a drink from her beer and wipes her mouth with the back of her hand. “He holds his dick and entertains himself. He asks me to whip him and fuck him in the ass with my strap-on. After that I say he can fuck you, while I watch and you suck me o f.” Her mouth curls in contentment, and if I didn’t know she was incapable of irony, this would be it.

  Since she mentioned this, I can’t get the pictures out of my head. Knowing Alex, he’d probably go for it. If he did, I would feel let down.

  Confused,

  Peg

  The message boards revived like dogs after a nap.

  Holehearted: “I want the threesome!”

  Chickenfingers: “I want to see Goldie do Alex with the strap-on.”

  Headgirl: “He’d probably like it.”

  Sizematters: “They’re much hornier now than they used to be.”

  Ninewide: “They haven’t been fucking anybody for weeks.”

  Headgirl: “How long can they go without it? Anybody want to get up a pool?”

  I would have said, “They can go on without it forever.”

  I have a small confession: I recently suffered the loss of love. In the first part of our romance, we used each other like spoons, to dig ourselves out of our lives. There was no second part. My lover left, uninterested, perhaps, in seeing what would happen next. There is nothing like part one. It makes you feel most alive, though it may be the least real part of life. When you are left, what you need is a suspension bridge, solid enough to absorb the shocks of wind and tremors. A bridge to a time when life will again barge in, demanding names, dates, and serial numbers, demanding you strip off disguises, spread yourself open for inspection, turn your attention outward, to the other’s fragility, until you well with so much tenderness it seems an oasis in a desert. Until then there are imagined smells and drumbeats sounding across a wilderness.

  What can happen between Alex and Peg? Can he bear their relationship if it doesn’t move to sex? Will he still want her after they have sex in every imaginable way? In time he will leave her or she will leave him. Or maybe not. Perhaps one day years off we will see them at a party, a fabulous event with tables of food. He will go to the desserts and pile up a plate of meringues, tarts, cookies, and chocolates. He will move slowly, and young people will watch him return to her with the spoils. He will place the plate before her. He will select a miniature blueberry tart and lift it to her lips. She will tilt her head back and open her mouth, as if on command and as if it still excites her.

  Perhaps in time they will disappear from this website. Perhaps in time I will be more occupied with my life than theirs.

  But not yet.

  Without Leaving Gone

  BY MARTIN ROPER

  I AM INSIDE HOLFY, bruising myself against her creased arse, thinking about Ursula. Imagining it is her. When I’m with Ursula, she struggles but secretly she enjoys it. That weekend we spent at her father’s home, the shy way she bent away from me, her hands gripping the mantelpiece, lifting her skirt, warm pert arse against me, her father’s laughter out in the garden (even his laughter sounded English), shuddering at her cheeks brushing the curled hairs on my stomach. Only later realizing the thrill for her was doing it in her father’s bathroom; I squirmed at the odd relationship she had with the man. The evening we spent in Searsons’. Ursula noticing me noticing some skirt walk past. The moment is irretrievable. Neither of us pretend it has not happened. I am not the kind of man to be tactless and I bite my tongue for the mistake. A marriage has many endings. We said nothing. The first slip. Cracks in our lives we fall into, cracks become walls around us. I curse and curse and Holfy comes and all the time it is Ursula’s back I am looking at in anger, it’s her moaning I hear, her cunt surrounding me.

  I have been lying for years—telling myself I want this kind of woman or that kind of woman. I want a woman I can fuck forever but have been too afraid to admit it. Ursula is a paragraph out of some feminist pamphlet. Holfy has changed my life. She fucks. She likes my seed leaking out of her. Soft bubbling of her cuntfarts afterward. I was afraid of my wife’s silent standard. The standards in her eyes she could never hide. That night in Searsons’ I went and got another drink and looked at her in the Smithwick’s beer mirror. She was biting the end of a hangnail. I thought then (and this was before we were married), I should walk out now. The coward leaves a thousand times and never leaves.

  The Resolution Phase

  BY ELLEN MILLER

  I FEARED FOR the worst. But it seemed Dick wanted me more than ever, now that I was dead. Back when I still burned the Shavian flame that’s always burning itself out, my sex drive was spirited and lively, even—especially—in the throes of moribund relationships. Sayonara sex. Last gasp sex. Don’t-let-the-door-hit-you-on-the-way-out sex. In earlier affairs, impending departure was always vivifying. I cleaved this way, hungry, detaching and adhering simultaneously to my beloved’s body. With Peter, Willie and Rod, sex was the first thing to start and the last thing to go. That was before, back when I was a breathing, locomoting, warm- and red-blooded female American organism. Being dead, I assumed things would taper off. I mean, how sexy can a girl feel after dying, when the maggots begin to lay eggs, when the pockets of liquid collect inside, when the lips start to drift? And how worked up can a girl get over the little death when she’s already had the big one?

  Still, Dick couldn’t keep his hot hands off me. The fact that I had joined the great majority apparently didn’t matter. He’d come home, find me lying supine in bed, and interpret my horizontal pose as an invitation to fuck. “You want me, eh?” he’d say, unzipping his fly. I was flattered, at first, by his continued sexual interest. How romantic! In life, I’d been so fearful that a single misstep, even a missed bikini-line waxing, would turn him off and away. How I’d underestimated his desire! Even death wasn’t sufficient to make him stop wanting me. In hushed, heartfelt tones, he kept declaring undying lust and then proceeding accordingly, his passion and loins overcoming our unfortunate obstacle.

  It kind of went like this: He’d separate my thighs to try to get in, but then they’d snap shut, bouncing a bit on the sheets before settling into a tight clench. When he’d finally get my legs apart, he’d hold them in a V and rub and thump his body up and down like a pile driver, but it wouldn’t be long before he lost his grip and my legs would push inward, squeezing, then crushing, his balls. Undeterred, he’d hoist one of my legs on each of his shoulders like a swashbuckler donning a cape. My feet would turn out into second position, my ankles would slide precariously down the slope of his shoulders, but before my legs crashed to the bed like timber, he’d grab each ankle and hold on tight.

  Afterward, he’d give me a chaste kiss. “You look so peaceful. Your lips are so nice and cool and dry. Your skin, too. A little pale maybe. Are you anemic? Doctor Cummings sells a great chelated iron supplement. It’ll give you energy, put color in your cheeks. And you know, your hair looks good when you don’t wash it. It’s growing so fast. Don’t cut it. But maybe we should trim your toenails. They’re getting a little long.”

  This technique worked until my body lost its stiffness. Everywhere my muscles slackened, lost their tone. Unable to grab and resist, my vaginal walls provided insufficient friction, then none. Dick couldn’t come. “I see you’ve stopped doing your Kegels,” he harrumphed. “This is pointless. How about a tit-fuck?” I didn’t respond. “Cool.”

  But eventually, my lack of enthusiasm started to turn him off.

  “What’s up? You won’t touch me. You won’t talk to me. You just lie there, not moving, not saying anything.”

  I had no response.

  “I see you have nothing to say to that either. Don’t you know that your passive-aggressive silence is sabotaging any chance we have of reviving this?”

  Again, no comment.

  To him, it was all a symptom of a larger, underlying problem. He’d been in analysis for six years. He knew about these things. Analysis had given him back his life and it could
give me back mine, if I wasn’t so passive, so lifeless, so stubbornly still. Dick was an American optimist. Although death is the universal complaint of the species, Dick believed that all problems could be “worked through.” Every complaint had a corresponding therapeutic intervention. When the overt symptoms were properly controlled the core issues could be exhumed. My inertia, my lack of “proactive, help-seeking motivation,” my empty stare into space with open but unseeing eyes, my “depressive, delusional” conviction that my existence could not be resurrected from its present state of decay—all these, Dick said, were things that skilled professionals could heal.

  Finally he demanded, “Come with me to see Dr. Buttram or I move out and leave you here to rot by yourself.” Couples counseling was a shared investment, he said, so I’d have to pay half of Dr. Buttram’s fee. I don’t know how Dick expected me to generate the money. He knew I wasn’t working, but I didn’t protest. Pleased, his posture softened, and he cuddled up next to me in bed. “Sweetheart, please, don’t freeze up on me.” He breathed hotly into my ear, then moved his foot toward mine. Before recent events—that is, before I paid the debt that cancels all others—I had liked for our feet to touch. He had delicate, sensitive feet, with smooth soles and toes aligned in perfect size order. Now, just before his toes curled around mine, he gasped. “You’ve got some wicked cold feet.” I didn’t move. He pulled the quilt over both of us. “Let’s get your tootsies roasty-toasty. You’ve got to relax.” He rubbed my neck, my shoulders. “You should go see Hyman, my massage therapist.” His fingers moved down the bones that were becoming prominent in my neck, chest, arms. “You’ll feel so alive afterward. You’ve lost touch with your body. You act so stiff.” He rolled on top of me so that the warm tip of his nose touched the cold tip of mine. “I’m stiff, too.” He chuckled. “In all the right places. I haven’t lost touch with your body. Or mine.” I remained silent. “Don’t worry, baby, I’m a well-oiled machine. I’ll do all the work. It’ll relax you. Warm you up. Thaw you out. If you want me to stop, just say so....I’ll take that as a yes.”

  Before our visit with Dr. Buttram, Dick discovered a new sexual domain—a horny, deviant purgatory ruled by demonic experimentation. I couldn’t ask what accounted for the shift. Instead of wooing me with reassurances that nothing could part us sexually—that he wanted me despite my immobility—he seemed to want me because of it. I wasn’t moving, but he didn’t seem to notice that I was dead. Of course, at the outset I figured he had to have noticed, but was enjoying his chance to mine the romantic potential of my paralysis. But then I became less and less sure, as Dick used the occasion to tap his deepest, strangest proclivities. The Sex for Dummies’ make-the-best-of-what-you’ve-got message inspired him. “Let’s view this not as a problem, but as a challenge. An opportunity,” he said, hard-on in hand, “for enormous growth. Enormous. Heh-heh. Call it an adventure.

  “All along it’s been so obvious that I couldn’t even see it. In your silence, you’ve been crying out loud for something new. Lady that you are, you’d never ask directly, or complain or demand anything. I understand now. Please, princess, chained in your lonely tower by the moat, if it excites you to feign indifference, to be cold and still and silent, to pretend that you don’t want me to ravish and ravage you, that you don’t love it when I take you against your will—go for it! Two can play. I’m comfortable in my masculinity. Really. I am. I’m confident enough not to need my desirability validated all the time. You want a good game of cat-and-mouse? Of hard-to-get? We’re both adults. We can be creative.”

  I said nothing.

  “You want cold?” He jangled a pair of steel handcuffs. “You want still?” He tossed four black bungee cords onto the bed. “You want silent?” He moved toward me, like a Looney Tunes kidnapper, with his gag-rag and duct tape. With a knee against each of my ears, Dick cranked apart my jaw with his penis until we fit like a ball-and-socket joint. “That’s it. Close it up tight. To the hilt. No bitching. No moaning. No choking or gagging reflexes allowed. Even if it kills you.”

  As if.

  Doctor Buttram nattered about the age-old sex-drive differential in the opposite sexes, recommended Mars and Venus in the Bedroom, pontificated—with emphasis provided by a wagging, erect index finger—on the universal female laments of never being heard, of being seen only as a sexual object, of compulsory participation in deadening, male-identified heterosexual patterns.

  “Things are coming to a head,” Dick fumed. “I’m about to blow my stack. I had to literally drag her out of bed this morning. She was lying there like always. Like a dead weight.”

  “Resistance to treatment, in the beginning, is to be expected, to be honored but not indulged. Tell me”—he turned to me—“Do you find talking about sex difficult?”

  I slumped in my chair.

  “Is it hard for you to talk to Dick about sexual feelings?”

  Dick spat. “She doesn’t have sexual feelings.”

  Doctor Buttram’s expression turned grave. “How does it make you feel to hear Dick speak that way?” He steepled his thumbs and index fingers, and looked above their apex at my face. “How do you feel right now, talking to me, a stranger, albeit one trusted by your beloved, about sex?”

  I made no reply.

  He suggested hearing from Dick while I took the time I needed “to warm up to the process.” I didn’t object to the idea. Doctor Buttram flipped to a new page of his legal pad, switched pens. “Dick, why don’t you tell me what your perceptions are of what happens when you initiate sex.”

  “I’ve told you a million times. She’s like a corpse.”

  “You might have told me in individual sessions, but your life-partner needs to hear you give voice to your concerns out loud, in her presence. At precisely what phase of the arousal process—the desire, excitement, orgasm, or resolution phase—do you see your sexual exchanges breaking down?”

  Dick laughed. “Let’s go for the short list and say where it doesn’t break down. She never starts me up. When I initiate, she’s reluctant and stiff, like she can’t be bothered. She doesn’t seem to miss it. I can’t sleep I’m so horny. She sleeps all night. All day, too. Doesn’t even notice I’m shaking the bed with my pud-pulling. I’ve never seen someone sleep so much.

  “The silence is killing me. It’s got to be killing her, too,” Dick blubbered unattractively. “All this passive-aggressive shit. Covert strategies.”

  “Dick, why don’t you try to avoid abstraction and intellectualization. Let me be the doctor. That’s my job. Yours is to describe what you feel.”

  They carried on, absorbing themselves in each other’s polysyllabic lingo. Who would use the biggest, longest words? Eventually Dr. Buttram broke off. “We have to stop. We’re not going to resolve this overnight. There’s a great deal to talk about, and it’s all quite rich. Before we jump to any conclusions, we need to eliminate all possible physiological etiologies of hypoactive desire. I want to send you to some specialists. Run some tests. You’ll need a pelvic, to check for atrophic vaginitis. I can refer you to someone for that, too.” He smiled a knowing smile, as if he’d had a pelvic. “Or do you have your own gynecologist?”

  I didn’t reply.

  Doctor Buttram nodded gently, his sympathy as plastic as a speculum. “I understand. Internal exams aren’t fun, I know, but it’s crucial. In case we’re dealing with dyspareunia or other sexual pain disorders. We might even be seeing a vaginal numbing syndrome.”

  “I hope she can rouse herself to take a shower before anyone looks too close,” Dick said.

  “I sense that you’re feeling some hostility, Dick. You’ll have to try to contain that until our next session.”

  “You know, Doctor, I don’t feel like a man anymore. I used to feel good about my sexuality. I was virile. I could make a dead woman come.”

  “Our time is up. We’ll start next time by exploring those feelings. Here’s your bill for this month.”

  Then he asked if I wanted to offer any last word
s before departing.

  But it was too late. I had done all that already.

  “A diminished sex drive can be a problem unto itself: hypoactive sexual desire disorder: HSDD,” droned Dr. Buttram. Dick smiled. He loved the bureaucratic officialdom of initials, abbreviations, acronyms. He loved the booming voices of experts, like narrators of nature documentaries, like Dr. Buttram, who continued, “Hypersomnia points to a clinical picture including, but not limited to, a major depressive disorder. Besides the presenting loss of libido and excessive sleep, social withdrawal, loss of interest in conversation or previously pleasurable activities, food apathy, hunched body posture, and absent zest for life all suggest major depression. I’m not ruling out HSDD, but what I see right before my eyes is a patient who presents six out of seven diagnostic criteria for major depression.”

  “Does that mean we aren’t going to talk about sex?”

  “Worry not, Dick. Sex is a central component of the human experience, carrying the symbolic cargo of the gestalt of the human dilemma.” Dick loved jargon. Dick loved German. “Another question worth exploring is whether the desire reduction is global, encompassing all sexual expressions, or limited to one particular activity. Some HSDD patients I treat have no desire for intercourse, but enjoy masturbation, mutual or solo, enhanced by pornography or marital aids, or driven simply by our wonderful, prehensile hands, our fingers like ten little lovers who know exactly what we enjoy.”

  “I doubt that she masturbates, but she won’t say. Don’t bother asking her.”

  “Masturbation is difficult for any of us to talk about, even when we’re feeling our best. Before we push such matters, Dick, we also have to consider this.” Doctor Buttram’s voice dropped, turned avuncular, unctuous, soft: an I’m-going-to-level-with-you-man-to-man voice. “Sometimes one partner’s low desire actually reflects an excessive need for sexual activity—a compulsion! an addiction!—in the other partner. Usually, the clinical picture isn’t that extreme. Or simple. More often, both partners have levels of desire within the normal range, but at different ends of a healthy continuum. In that case, we need to work on compromise. And communication.”