We stood facing each other beside the bed for a long, still moment, eye to eye, just the palms of our hands touching. I felt strangely lightheaded, almost high; ready to slip my control of the situation, myself, give it all over to that certainty at my core that she believed in and I didn’t.
Then she turned from me, her hand reaching for the zipper at the back of the green sheath dress: a graceless gesture, a turn-off, a renunciation of the openness building between us.
I reached for her shoulder, spun her around to face me as gently as I could, pulled her arm down to her side. Her eyes widened in confusion (maybe in fear?); her jaw tightened, then her mouth opened in a big protesting “O”.
I sealed her lips with my finger, smiled and said: “Dig.”
I began to unbutton my shirt. She looked at me as if I were crazy, as if a male strip were some kind of ultimate perversion. But as I threw off the shirt, took off my undershirt and bared my chest, her face relaxed and she kept her eyes on me all the way as I kicked off my shoes and pulled off my socks.
I unbuckled my belt, unzipped by fly, paused for a moment and smiled at her, digging her digging me. And she was digging me; her eyes were openly hot and she gave me a brave little smile that swelled my groin and made me vibrate deep inside.
She moved closer. We were almost touching, eye to eye, as I let the pants drop and stepped out of them.
I reached for the shorts, but she pulled my hand away, smiled at me and drew them off herself. It was a strangely beautiful feeling, standing naked before her and she fully clothed. We made no move to touch each other; she stared openly at my cock as if she had never seen one before in her life. And in a peculiar way, I suppose she never had—never had taken a long, lingering look between a man’s legs. It was almost like capturing her virginity.
Then, still facing me, not taking her eyes from mine, she unzipped her dress in an awkward behind-her-back motion, kicked off her shoes and stepped out of the dress, letting it lay where it had fallen. She wore no stockings, just a white bra and functional white panties. She unhooked the bra, threw it to the floor, and her breasts hung free, the nipples pink and erect. I reached out with both hands and rolled the panties down her thighs, feeling the warmth of her flesh beneath my palms.
We stood before each other truly naked. I knew that we had just won a kind of victory together, and, aroused though I was, I felt a curious asexual tenderness behind it. Or could it be sexual tenderness—discovering for the first time that such a thing could be?
We took each other in our arms, gently, as if each of us believed the other were made of transparent, fragile crystal.
I kissed her, closed-mouthed, softly: a child’s kiss. Her lips were closed against mine but there was no resistance to them. I parted her lips with mine and inhaled her sweet breath, then sighed my own breath into her. In, out, in out; just our breaths, our essences, mingling in sexual rhythm. Then I let my tongue pour lazily into her mouth—and tasted her groan of pleasure as her arms suddenly tightened around my waist. Our tongues met inside her mouth, caressing each other in the warm moistness. As our tongues’ juices mingled filling the place between our mouths, blurring my sense of what was her body and what was mine, I felt a switch close somewhere inside of me, heat coursed up through my body, and I pulled her tight against me and my tongue began thrusting deeper, deeper, faster, faster, and I felt her mouth contracting around it rhythmically kiss-kiss-kiss.
Then her weight pulled me forward with her down onto the bed, on top of her, our mouths still a separate fused universe, where I tasted her tasting me tasting her.
I felt her hand moving down the valley of my spine, over the cheeks of my ass, up my belly and down, and then she held the very root of my cock, fingers stroking it while her palm lightly touched the softness of my balls.
My mouth tore itself from hers in a moan that seemed to pulse up my whole body from the base of my spine where my hips began to move before I knew it to the coaxing of her hand. I ran my hand down her belly and between the silk of her inner thighs and was rewarded with an answering moan as her legs clamped my hand to her and her hips began to undulate beneath me. Her hand began to work faster and faster and I felt myself building building building up to a quick crest. I remembered last time and a pang of fear went through me—too quick! too quick!
I looked down at her face: eyes rolling behind half-closed lids, mouth open and groaning. I kissed each of her eyes in quick succession; they opened, she smiled, and I felt we were in contact now at both ends of our beings. She ran her tongue cat-like over her lower lip as if acknowledging the moment and—
In one smooth motion, she thrust me into her and clamped her legs around my waist. I groaned, screamed. Too beautiful! I slid my arms under her body and hugged her to me.
I began moving my hips in a slow-grinding rhythm—she bucked under me, faster and faster, half a beat ahead of me, throwing me off-stride. I kept to my rhythm but began moving my body harder, more forcefully, trying to break her to my moves. But she kept bucking harder and harder, faster and faster, off in some turned-inward world of her own.
A savage rage tore through me: I wasn’t going to let this happen again! A feral wisdom took hold—I bit her on the breast, hard, tasting the salt of her skin on my tongue.
She screamed in pain—but I felt her rhythm break under the shock and I started thrusting harder and harder, but slowly, majestically, grinding my hips in a circle with each thrust.
And her scream faded into a deep moaning and she was with me, her hips moving with mine in sweet counterpoint. I let myself go, turned off my mind as our bodies moved with each other, flesh dancing with flesh in perfect rhythm, building and building and building, our moans mingling feeding our bodies feeding our moans feeding each other building building building—
A scream! A tremendous earthquake of flesh against me, a spasm from the very bowels of her being, a total contraction of flesh sound soul—
That flipped over every synapse in my body into a white-out pleasure-flash that shot through my body up my balls into my cock and then through me as the universe exploded through a beat of nonbeing...
A moment later, I opened my eyes and met hers, warm and bright and heavy-lidded in the dim light. I kissed her lips tenderly, gently, a child’s kiss, ending up as it had begun.
“Oh yes...” she sighed. “Yes... yes... yes....”
Lying under the covers together, warm and toasty, naked hips just barely touching, staring up dreamily at the ceiling, then at each other.
“That was...” Arlene sighed.
I touched a finger to her lips. “It just was, is all. Let’s leave it at that.” I ran my hand down over her chin, across her collarbone, smoothed the bite I had made on her breast. Feeling the welt made by my own teeth, I felt a pang of shame—but I also felt myself swelling a bit under the covers. Not now, I thought, maybe later.
“Un... about that...” I mumbled uneasily, “I hope you don’t think I’m some kind of sadist....”
She laughed at me with her eyes. “If you’re a sadist, I’m a masochist, because I loved it... No... I didn’t like the pain... but it... you know... set me free....”
I nodded. The warmth of Arlene Cooper’s body in my bed, the smell of her in my nostrils, all’s right with the world. It was something much more delicious than just the afterglow of a fine fuck. Once, maybe because I was very stoned, I had been able to make a Celebrated Nymphomaniac come for the first time in five years of very heavy trying. Now I remembered how good that had felt; I had had that with Arlene but I had had something even better: the feeling (whether I deserved it or not) that I had achieved what I had not because of how good I had been but because of what I was. I may have had as tasty moments in the act of fucking, but I had never felt this good afterward.
“Funny...” Arlene was mumbling, “pain doing that for me...”
I stroked the soft mound of her breast, snuggled closer to her. Was this love I was feeling now? Who knows what the word means?
I knew I had walked an extra mile for Arlene, and would probably walk a mile beyond that. Was I in love? I didn’t think so. But yes, we were lovers now....
“Maybe it’s just a physical reaction... pain at the right moment transmuting into pleasure—”
Skin to skin, the emotion I felt was too complex to have a name. I didn’t want to name it, but I wanted to recognize it somehow with a symbol—like a class-pin or a ring. But what was the right symbol for a thing like this...?
“...maybe it is masochistic—”
“Hey,” I said, suddenly inspired. “I’d like to give you a key to my apartment.”
Arlene looked at me, seemed to come back from someplace she had been all by herself: “What?”
“I said I’d like to give you a key to my pad.”
She shrank away from me slightly, looked at me as if I had flipped. “The key to your apartment?” she said. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
I smiled at her. “Well, in the square world out there, a guy gives a girl an engagement ring when he’s decided to think seriously about marrying her. So I want to give you the key to my pad to show you that I’m thinking seriously about asking you to live with me.”
She screwed up her face and shook her head. “That’s the screwiest thing I’ve every heard!” she said. She did not seem amused.
“Don’t you dig sentiment?” I said. Then, seeing that she was starting to smirk as if it were a joke: “I’m not putting you on; I really mean it.”
She looked at me; her eyes narrowed. “You do mean it seriously, don’t you?” she said.
I nodded.
“Then I should consider it as a serious matter, shouldn’t I?”
I nodded again.
“Well look,” she said, “if you really mean it as a commitment to think seriously about living together sometime, then accepting the key means I agree to think seriously about it too.”
“Exactly.”
“Then accepting the key is a serious step in itself.”
“I suppose so.”
“Well, then, I can’t accept the key.”
“Why the hell not?”
“Because I’m not really sure what happened tonight,” she said.
“What do you mean you don’t know what happened? We made love, is what happened, we made love. We finally got through to each other.”
Her jaw clenched, a muscle began twitching at the hinge of her jawbone; she drew her body away from me under the covers. “I felt something with you that I never felt before,” she said. “But how do I know it wasn’t just an animal reaction? Maybe you just did something to my body—”
“Oh shit! Can’t you even tell what you feel?”
“I know what I felt, but I don’t know what it means. I’m not in love with you, Tom.”
“I didn’t say I was in love with you.”
“Then what?”
“You mean something to me, is all. There’s a way to say it in Spanish: mi casa es tu casa, my home is your home. That’s what the key is supposed to say.”
“That’s beautiful,” she said, “and I really do appreciate it. But I can’t go into something like that without thinking about it. I’ve got to understand my feelings first... maybe Friday at our group—”
I sat bolt upright in bed. “The Group!” I yelled. “The fucking Foundation? You’re gonna drag Harvey in bed with us?”
“That’s what group sessions are for,” she said firmly. “To help us understand our feelings....”
“Of all the fucking idiocy! Look baby, I understand my feelings about you and I understand my feelings about.... Ah, shit!”
“You’re not being logical about it.”
“And you’re being too damned logical!”
I sensed her withdrawing behind her eyes as they got cold and calculating. She glanced at the clock. “Look,” she said, “I’ve got an early class tomorrow. I think I better go home now. Otherwise, we’ll just fight all night.”
“Aw for crying out—” I cut myself off. About the one thing, she was right: if I had to listen to much more Foundation crap from her tonight, I’d pop my cork for sure.
So I just lay there in bed stewing in my own juices as she got up and started to dress. Part of me wanted to tell her to get lost, get out of my life, go fuck Harvey Brustein or take on the whole Foundation in a neo-Freudian gang-bang.
But I remembered having told myself that I would go another extra mile for this girl. And I remembered that I had broken through her biggest hang-up tonight. And I remembered that our relationship was in motion—maybe it was just asking too much to expect her to give up the navel-staring of the damned group cold turkey, without my help.
So when she had dressed, and leaned over the bed, and kissed me goodnight, and asked with a worried frown: “You will be at the group?” I smiled nastily and said: “Yeah, baby, I’ll be there. But don’t expect me to hold back anything. I think this is sick and I intend to say so. No holds barred.”
“That’s the name of the game,” she said, just before she left. And left me with a wan, brave, lost little smile.
And how do you turn your back on that, smart-ass?
11 - Mano a Mano
I just sat back in my seat at the left end of the semi-circle of folding chairs, kept my mouth shut tight and glowered, letting the rest of them work Harvey around like sparring partners. I was trying to build up an effect: I had sat down as soon as I came in, had maneuvered Arlene into taking the far right seat opposite me at the other horn of the crescent, so that the rest of them—Doris, Charley and Ida to my right, Linda Kahn and Rich Rossi to Arlene’s left—were boxed in between us, with Harvey at the apex of our little isosceles triangle. And while Rich bitched about fucking up his sex life, and Charley insisted he was off the sauce and did not consider himself a washed-up middle-aged failure, and Ida refused to discuss her sexual fantasies, I just sat there like a wooden Indian staring now at Arlene, now at Harvey, thinking black thoughts and projecting ominous vibes.
It felt almost good. I was in the room purely to sock it to Harvey and show Arlene what a prick he was. It might be his turf, but when the deal came around to me, we were going to play by my rules. In fact, in a way, we were already playing by my rules because my silence and the poisonous looks I was giving Harvey were really getting the animals uptight; the whole group was off-balance and lines of curiosity and hostility were becoming skewed in my direction. It was only a matter of time before the tension-wave broke over me.
Linda Kahn was mouthing some bibble about the ingrained hostility of men caused by the competitive nature of American society, or some such hash of Marx-cum-Freud. The masculine egos in the room were snarling back at her. Arlene was sneaking nervous glances at me every time she thought I wasn’t looking. Any minute now, the shit would hit the fan...
“Now look at that over there,” Linda said, pointing at me. “It hasn’t said a word all evening. Just sits there pouting like a sullen little boy. There’s your masculine hostility!”
Harvey, perhaps sensing that even the chicks were getting tired of listening to Linda’s dumb bullshit, looked my way and said: “I do notice that you haven’t said anything so far, Tom. You were quite outspoken at the last group; what’s troubling you tonight?”
I smiled my best eat-shit smile. “Sex,” I said. A wave of giggling smirks went through the peanut gallery and we were off to the races.
“That’s a pretty broad topic,” Harvey said.
“It’s a broad topic, anyway,” I said with as much crude in my voice as I could muster. The bad-pun groans were music to my ears.
“Is there some trouble between you and Arlene?” Doris asked. Good old Doris!
“Yeah, there’s some trouble between me and Arlene.”
“She threw you another lousy fuck, didn’t she?” Rich said.
Not really meaning it this time, I thought Humphrey Bogart at him, said: “I warned you about your mouth before, creep. I won’t warn you again.” True to form the balles
s wonder sat back in his chair, pulled in his horns.
“Actually,” I said, “sex really isn’t the problem.”
“Oh yeah, Hollander?” Charley said. “Then why did you say it was?”
I smiled sweetly. “Because I wanted you jerks to get your jollies,” I said. “Got all your dirty little minds drooling, didn’t it?”
“The little boy wants to play his little games,” Linda simpered. “Isn’t that cute?”
“Maybe I should whip my cock out so you can bring yourself off baby,” I suggested good-naturedly. “You can’t come anywhere else, maybe you should try getting yourself off in group. That’s what you’re here for anyway, isn’t it?” And I made a phony move towards my fly.
Linda turned a whiter shade of pale. Ida looked like she couldn’t decide between fainting like a proper lady or daring me to really do it. Arlene looked quite properly aghast but I sensed she was getting a charge out of it, maybe because everyone knew where the organ in question had last been; there was hope for the chick yet. The rest of them, except for Doris and Harvey, did their best to look snide. Doris gave me a look that told me she knew I was playing some game and was mildly interested in where I was going.
Harvey cracked neither a smile nor a sneer; instead he made with the psychiatrist’s pounce. “Do you often feel exhibitionist tendencies?” he said.
“Only in subways and men’s rooms,” I told him, writhing in mock ecstasy. “I can’t help it—something about dirty white tile just turns me on.” It would be interesting to see if I could gross Harvey out.
“Come on Tom,” Harvey said humorlessly, “what’s really bothering you?”
“The varieties of erotic response,” I told him. “Aren’t you hip to Krafft-Ebing?”
“Come on, Hollander, stop beating around the bush,” Charley said.
“Isn’t the real question whose bush is who beating about?” I said.
Harvey pouted slightly. “I really don’t think this deliberate vulgarity is necessary,” he said stiffly. So it was possible to gross old Harv out. I filed it for future reference.
The Children of Hamelin Page 16
