Saline Solution (3 page)

'Yes, that's marriage,' I thought, and felt another pang in my groin at the memory of the little girl at the ice cream parlour.

'Do you have a television set here?' Francis asked.

Lucinda and I looked at each other, and through the door into the scene in the next room. We smiled at one another.

'There it is,' she said to Francis.

The four of us sat, drinking tea and smoking grass, under a Halloween lampshade some ten feet in diameter that Donna had installed. The entire house had the air of a Hitchcock movie, although most of the dialogue was out of Beckett. Once again, it was all a play. Reality was merely real. And made up of plays within plays. Lucinda and Francis and I agreeing to a momentary perception; then Lucinda and I; then Bertha and Francis; then Francis and I. Occasionally all four of us would share the moment.

And within myself an infinity of costumes beckoned for realisation. An army of identities marching through oblivion. I became light-headed with the vision as we all sat quite still in the wooden seashell of a house, listening to the sound of waves. For a long bent instant I was held in phenomenological thrall.

In my mind I had the teenager tied to a bed: She is pure motherscreaming cunt, she is quintessence of handgripping tit, she is ultimate arse begging to be fucked. I am into a stoned De Sade head, and my cock will never get soft, not once. I go and get her and get her and get her until she is as raw as the belly of a scraped artichoke leaf. Her legs kick off into the sky. And finally she snaps the final thread and sails into the eye of the sun crying YES down the corridors of infinity while I bask in the great heat of her sacrifice and sing ME! ME! ME!

'To be divisible is to be ontological,' Francis was saying.

I looked at him. Ah yes, back to the reality of the room.

'Somehow,' I thought, 'it should be all different.' But there was no context in which to plant my dissatisfaction. The conversation went on around me. 'The gun is the ultimate metaphysical argument,' I heard myself saying. I assumed that my statement somehow fitted the drift of talk we were all swaying in. 'Why aren't we fucking,' I thought, 'instead of sitting around dropping dumb words into indifferent space?'

Francis and I considered ourselves hip acidhead ex-reality trippers who had done all the scenes, and yet sexually we were as regular and as hypocritical as Methodists from southern Illinois. When I lived alone, I could be completely polymorphous perverse. But as soon as I got mated, I snapped right back into conventionally conditioned patterns, and did my swinging on the sly.

This time there was an added factor. A few weeks after Lucinda and I began living together, my doctor examined me and announced a verdict of amoebic dysentery. 'Do you have much homosexual activity?' he asked.

It wasn't a pass. He went on to declare that an epidemic was sweeping the gay world, going from arsehole to cock to mouth, or directly from arsehole to mouth, depending on circumstances and proclivities. He went through the ritual of prescription pad and somber prohibitions. 'If you want to protect yourself against this in the future,' he said, 'no more arse-licking with strangers, and don't suck any cocks unless you are sure they're clean. Wash with hot soapy water first.'

The announcement knocked me off balance. Promiscuity had been forbidden me on doctor's orders, and I was beginning what seemed to be a rational relationship with Lucinda. It seemed a good time to experiment, and I thought I would try what for me has been the greatest perversion: monogamy.

'I've decided to be faithful to you,' I said to Lucinda when I returned from his office.

'Don't do me any favours,' she said.

'I thought you'd be glad,' I said.

'Just fuck me enough,' she said. 'What else you do is your business.'

The edge had been shaved off my project, but I appreciated her good sense. We had known each other for six years, but vaguely, through the screen of theatre workshops which formed my most intense subterranean existence for a period during the early sixties. Several times a week I would stagger through the daisy chain of neo-Stanislavskians who flutter about the upper West Side. And on occasion I would find myself involved in some scene or exercise with Lucinda. Once, during the Theatre of Encounter's structured group gropes, I found myself sucking a big toe that I later learned belonged to her. And when we decided to spend the summer together, we were both surprised.

She stood there smiling. She had a moodily voluptuous mouth, a serious arse, and a private income. 'I think it would be very nice if you were faithful to me,' she said.

I embarked on the Yoga of Fidelity. In the beginning, the discipline was exhilarating. I felt my decision like a harness holding me in check. I chose to ignore Christ's observation that a man who lusts after a woman in his heart has already committed adultery with her, and continued to ravish most of the women I saw with my eyes. But I made no movement to act. After a while, I began to be comfortable with, and finally to enjoy, my restraint. For the first time in my life I had something which kept me from certain aspects of my sexual life.

Like a blind man who becomes sensitive to sound, I began to tune in on the more subtle vibrations of sex. Cut loose from my fixation on penetrating all orifices, I began to notice postures and textures, poses and thoughts. Women came gradually into focus as creatures whose delight far surpassed brute copulation. I started to understand moods, and the fleeting expressions of sudden joy or emotional pain that would flit across a woman's face became precious to see. In stores or on the street I came to realise that hundreds of thousands of women were available all the time. Once actual fucking was barred, one could feast on all the rest that is revealed simply by how sharply or softly a woman makes a gesture, like curling her fingers to caress her lips.

But as I gained in subtlety I found myself growing in attraction for women. They might look at me quizzically, or make several attempts to approach, or begin conversations with, 'Do you mind if I speak freely?' Without willing it, I was secreting seduction. It was as though I became a woman myself. My cock having been retired from all activity except with one person, and my sexual drive sublimated into pantomime, I had no trouble being one of the girls. On a number of evenings I sat on the mattress in our bedroom on the Island, three or four women around, all of us in varying states of undress, Lucinda serving tea, the Stones playing, and the vibrations as thick as in a locker room. The softer I got, the more I lay back, the less I thought about anything at all, the more irresistible I became. I was at an exquisite edge, and the closer I hewed to my principle of fidelity the greater my options grew, and the higher the stakes of the game. The question was: when would I cash in the chips of my splintered vow?

When Lucinda announced that she was pregnant, my fantasy enlarged to almost totally overshadow reality. I would not only transmute my nature at a stroke and be monogamous, I would also enter the realm of fatherhood. The archetypal heroes trotted out to have their day. I took all the predictible trips on the mystery of heredity, and nused on the power of influence one has over a newborn infant. I ranged from the practical to the sentimental, and milked the idea of having a child for every last symbol.

Yet, at heart, I had no more feeling about it other than

an unusually sharp curiosity.

Francis was pasting collages in his diary, writing around them with multicoloured felt-tip pens. The page in front of him read, 'Suigenocide. Entropy is the final solution.' Bertha read. Lucinda was in revery.

The fantasies of faithful fatherhood had taken a long while to snap under the terrible pressures of human reality. Sexually, the hunger to be had by a man grew in my mouth and in my bowels. Lucinda couldn't fill that role. At times I would attempt to get her to sit on my face and pin my wrists down and grind her cunt into my lips and teeth. But she didn't have the energy for that, and she didn't have a cock. A few times I almost cried out to be fucked, but some force trapped the words in my throat. I needed male energy.

One afternoon, as I was sitting quietly on the sand, panic seized me. I felt trapped. No more men. No other women. Locked in the toils of a Freudian family, but now as the father instead of the child. I shrank in horror. And yet so insanely was I gripped in my own image of how I thought I would like to try being, that I couldn't break out of the prison I had built myself.

Lucinda's body began to seem like a coil of flypaper. Her skin became porous, sucking. For ten days of that period we fucked three or four times a day. Long intense dance dramas and depth contests. I was Sisyphus trying with focused anguish to get the stone balanced on top of the hill once and for all. And I reached right up to a bare millimeter of the exact top, lifting the ponderous machinery of our personalities with us. I was wrung dry of sperm and energy and desire, and she squeezed tight in an effort to suck the final drop from me. I pulled out of her cunt and crawled up so that my cock slid into her half-open mouth. She lay inert got a moment and then doubled up at the waist, covering the length of my prick in a single gulp. I sank into her throat and began to rock back and forth, jerking off on her tongue. I fucked her for a very long time, in her mouth and throat and head, so deep and hard that the sperm exploded into her windpipe and she coughed and spluttered, and when she had come to, deliberately spat it out.

That night I stopped being faithful. And I began to question the widsom of letting the baby be born.

She apologised sincerely, and after that dutifully swallowed every drop of come I discharged into her mouth, but that was not the same as when we were innocent of the way in which we were meant to destroy one another. Once we had removed ourselves from the struggle to become, sex lost its urgency.

Francis and Bertha were making let's-fuck eyes at one another across the table. Lucinda announced her decision to go to bed. The people in the next room had vanished. I walked down to the beach, lay on the sand and got lost in the stars. I pulled on my cock slowly until it stirred and waited for whoever else would come down to the beach, wanting. I wondered what relationship there was between the erection in my hand and the astonishing universe expanding in searing blackness before my eyes. Reality and fantasy are never quite so right as when they are motion-fully intertwined with all of their externals in one another's internals and diddling and sniggling SNORK WHEE THUD again.

Ill

'Krishnamurti is a moving hypnotist.'

Bosley's voice dripped in easy cadences at the other end of the line.

'But please, darling, I need you to fuck me,' I said.

'Ouugh. So free!'

He put me off and put me down in that gentle teasing way which made him so exciting. Lucinda was due back in the evening, but I was ready to swing in to the city and spend a day with Bosley. The man mood was on me again. And I wanted to yield, not to analyse. After all the years of battling with labels, I knew that any attempted judgement of sexual behaviour was stupid. And yet there was no peace. Was my desire for men an escape from my inability to make it with a woman, my fear of having a child? Or was my repeated effort at marriage a refusal to face the fact of my basic homosexuality? Instinctively, both bisexuality and celibacy seemed evasions. There was nothing for it but to continue the daily process of observation and struggle, finding out where my impulses led me.

'Why won't you let me come over?' I said.

'You're getting like a sad old whore.'

'That's all there is baby, the rest is just talk.'

'Well, then, let's talk business. What exactly do you want?'

'I want it slow and heavy, like the beat in the Mighty Quinn. You know that kind of ride?'

'Honey, this is
me
you're talking to. Umm, go ahead, I'm listening.'

'A long time for mouths, maybe a half hour. Just for kissing, for lips, for teeth, your teeth on me, and tongues, then tongues, and breath. And feeling the heat in my chest burning, making me dizzy, making me dizzy, making me weak in your arms. I rub my body against yours, squirm against you. Oh darling, please, let me hold myself against you.'

'Take your time.'

'You then, biting my nipples. You grunting in my ear. You licking the soft flesh on my inner thighs, making my knees tremble. I get small like a baby, helpless in your arms. You inserting your finger, moving it deep into me, slowly, letting me feel you, and feel that you feel me, and holding me like that, suspended, squatting, hanging, impaled on your hand, black pleasure, and your mouth on my ... on my . . .'

'Were you going to say "cunt", baby?'

'Oh yes, my cunt.'

'That thing you got there is a cock, sweetheart. You ain't a woman. I don't like cunts.'

'Don't push me away.'

'Suck it.'

'Yes, make me go down on you. Such a long time on your cock. Sliding my tongue in the hollow of your throat and licking your hard chest, tasting the salty sweat on your belly, lapping over all your skin, into the musk of your hair, and finally having your beautiful cock in my mouth. For such a long time. Slippery warm thing. Mother's nipple.

Father's censored place. The soft of the ridged rim. The bulk of it in my throat, gagging, suck, oh my Cock, oh my most Eternal Cock. Whimpering, Shuddering. And strength from your burning onto my lips. Let . . . me . . . lick . . . it. . . . Fuck me in the mouth, stuff your cock in my mouth, put your arse on my mouth, hit my mouth . . .'