A Matter of Love in da Bronx (49 page)

My button just aches. And throbbing. I never felt it throb so. I wonder...I wonder if he'll ever feel inclined to...he said he'd kiss me all over. What must it be like to have his tongue touch it all over until he made it happen? --Don't say that word again or I will.

Jesus! What must it be like to want someone as bad as this and know it could never happen? I think you have touched on the true meaning of suffering. --I'm so hard it hurts.

If we can't actually be in each other's arms, the next best thing is to talk ourselves there...or is it the first worst thing? --I want to feel it touch me...there. I want to feel you come into me, slowly, ever so slowly so I can remember every single moment, every single bit of you moving deeper, deeper inside me, wanting you so badly...

Yes! Yes! Every single bit of me touching every single bit of you. Me surrounded completely by you; you surrounded completely by me. Us into each other. Consuming ourselves with love, transforming ourselves into each other! We express it physically, but our consummation will be truly ethereal. --Mary! I've got to have you; I want to feel you possess me, every bit of me...

It's almost like we're there! Together! Unable to see, to breathe, to feel, just to soar through space! --...then I want you to slide out ever so slowly, to wait a moment or two perhaps, then...! Thrust, wanting me so madly, back inside me so hard and deep my ears will pop...

There! Take it! Take it! Take it! My fucking cock is going to go right through the table! Say it! Jesus how I want her. Say it! Jesus how I wish we could make love! Say it! Jesus Christ! How I wish we could fuck! --How fantastic! I wouldn't believe it was us!

I would never make you ever feel sorry you loved me because I would love you so wildly in every way. --I would make you come so madly...

Every muscle in my body hurts; I've strained so... --In my madness I would make you come until you screamed...

Now I can understand Louisa's level, even Gina's level, even without the element of love. Just on the plain, pure physical ecstasy of romance. --I would scream in ecstasy over and over again until I felt your hardness stretch me to the limits of this world. What could the bliss be like to have your most sacred, beautiful lover make sacred beautiful love?

If I could only crawl into this phone, and come into your mouth. --Like I was kissing you all over your body all at once, sucking you deep inside me as you released your soul, bit by bit, drop by drop through your pearly wet sex...

Sure, Father, tell me again how to practice restraint. No. Don't tell me how to do it; you tell me how you do it. Once you've mastered it, O Celibate Pontificus, you are something quite else; but one thing you're not is human. --I would strain to suck you dry, until I possessed all the juice of your love. Oh! Sweetheart! Do it now! For me! Kiss the palm of your hand, now let the tip of your tongue make circles, now, up and down, up and down' now, pull in your thumb, hard; hard! Suck it! Suck it! Are you doing it?

I'd stick my elbow in my ear is you said. Crazy! A couple weeks ago, if anyone told you kissing your own hand would be sensual you would've told him poking his own eye out would be orgasmic! --Yes! ...Oh! Yes...

I can't believe this! Standing in a phone booth preparing to have an orgasm! --I can feel it! I can feel it, like your lips and tongue and caressing my clitoris...Oh! God! I want you to make me come so badly. I want it...I need it! Sam! What are we going to do!

This is getting just a little too weird. --Does it work better if I suck my big toe?

Only someone rescued from the wasteland of being an old maid could appreciate such humor. --You would spoil it. Just as well, if I went back to work still high on that trip I'd melt right at the machine. Why couldn't we be like on television, like Krystal and Blake Carrington with all that money, big house, servants, jewels, furs, limousines...

I can see myself, tycoon with the biggest upholstery shop on the East Coast! --That's all part of the mirage. That's what fascinates people. Why do you think it's so popular? It's a parasite that feeds on people's wishes. It's dishonest, total fiction...

--I wouldn't miss a minute of it...

--I'd watch, too, if they'd let Krystal and Blake do one thing...

--Make love?

--No. Fart.

--You're awful.

--It would make them human. It would make them real people. Like us. That would get my interest.

--I've got to get ready to go back to work.

--What have you got to do to get ready?

--Things... Darling, I'll be thinking of you every second until I see you tonight.

You can't delay another moment. You can't let her anticipate one thing for tonight, and get another. --Sweetheart, we won't be able to go to a motel or anything like that. That's what I had to talk to you about. I'm sorry I have to tell you like this...

God! I told you! I told you to be careful! To go easy! He's going to break my heart even before we got started! --Sam, you don't love me and you don't want to see me anymore--you just have to say it! Just come right out and say it! We're grownup people! We can deal with hard truth easier than with lame hypocrisy! I've got to go! Really!

Oh! You shithead! Why can't you express exactly what you mean! --Oh! No! No! I'm sorry...

I can't believe this! --I bet you are! I really must go.

Fuck! Don't do this to me! --I'll meet you tonight by Santini Moving as we planned...

Click.

Unheard.

--...I'm sorry it came... Oh! Shit! She hung up. I'll try to call her back. Waste of time. What have I done? Stupid! Stupid! Christ! Does she have to be so fucking sensitive? Couldn't she have trusted me a little more? Just a bit and she would've heard: I'm sorry it came out like that, that you even got the slightest hint that it was anything like that! I apologize a million times, my darling! I love you with a passion that will last through the ages. Never doubt that. Never. I'm broke. That's all. My folks needed every cent I had, and there'll be no salary until Sol gets back. I'm just pocket broke, not soul broke. A little sick about it, but we'll manage. Maybe we can go to Lou's room. He lives alone in a furnished room, as you know. I think we might be okay there, if that's okay with you. Phone up.

Suspended animation.

PALY SHADOWS pursued each thought its refuge dissuading Sam from those easy rationalizations lovers knew were pure invention, but devised, nevertheless, to sustain the dulcificent wrenching that evoked beatific dividends. And he knew it! It was as if he were watching himself! Listening to another Sam think. And wonder. And speculate. As if he were high in a tennis judge's chair watching two opponents do battle for a point. Weird! But inherent to a heart's territory?

--Was this the same with every lover?

--You mean, with everyone in love--there is a distinction between the two, you know. Like you're in love, not a lover. A lover gets laid, which you do not. And to answer your question, no, it's not the same with everyone in love. Perhaps everyone in love for the first time.

--A lover--to end this discussion--is anyone who loves, laid, unlaid, never laid. Mary forgot our date, right?

--Jerk. Wrong.

--Okay, so maybe she was entitled to get pissed at me because of the phone conversation.

--You'd like to believe that, wouldn't you? Well, don't. She's not pissed at you.

--She's not?

--No, you fucking idiot, because all you are to her now is a non-entity. A shit. She doesn't want a damn thing more to do with you. Christ! The way you talk, the way you think who wants to be in eleventh gear going a zillion miles an hour all the time!

--Make up your mind! Am I an idiot or a brain?

--Oh! That's ones easy; just decide how you got into this mess.

--That's easy. They don't give her enough lunch time to make a long enough phone call.

--You oughta make a phone call and get Rent-A-Brain for the intellectually impaired instead of being here, sitting on Lou's doorstep mentally jerking off about Mary.

That's where he was. Sitting on the porch where Lou Harness kept a furnished room. He hated the thought of going to the upholstery shop; a walk through Bronx Park would be a continuous question concerning his sexual preference mostly by cocksuckers of the evening; and the thought of going home not even in the running. So, Lou's. Besides, Sam needed a friend. He walked the Bronx until he was exhausted, a quick, lively pace as if he were going someplace important in a hurry, like home from work. Eventually, he plotzed himself down to wait for Lou who finally arrived near two in the morning.

--Sam? Who died? Whenever I see you here, I always think first somebody died. So, who died?

--Guess who died.

--Sounds the name of a stage play. I gotta write that down. Guess Who Died. Can you imagine the answers? Ask a hundred people. --Guess who died? Can you believe the answers? Come on in. I got beer. Or do you want coffee? Let's go get a beer. If I let you in fucking landlady says I had sex, so I have to pay for double occupancy.

--So show her your dick. After a night with Louisa it must be dead.

--Oh! So nobody died. That's nice.

--Lou--he buried his head in his arms--I died.

--Oh! Shit! We'd better go in. You're going to cost me extra room rent, drink all my beer, and I'm not going to get any nooky. Why don't you be a real good friend and go home?

Daylight came in six-packs, a container holding six bottles of beer, four to a case. Lou's inventory was two cold six-packs, four warm. By the time Sam left Lou was out of beer, except for the one he kept in the toilet tank for emergencies to fight the hangover blues, which he would take warm with six aspirin and two Alka-Seltzer just before he left for work at eight o'clock, in about three hours.

Daylight also came in pisses, about an equal number for each, or, as Lou estimated, a bottle a pee.

There was, after all, besides Mary, substantive subjects considered.

On death:

Recipe: Fancy bronze casket, complete with springs, silk pillow, and a one-year battery operated vcr with the movie of your choice (also available with perpetual cable television programming); up three flower cars (realistic plastic blooms); super-black stretch limos; and a uniformed (no braids showing) motorcycle escort to assure at least a two-minute stoppage of traffic. A mausoleum, naturally, in the condominium motif with marbleized plastic walls with perpetual care, complete with a weekly change of the polyethylene bud vase and flowery contents, and an annual change of the wallpaper mural depicting any of several seascape, woodland, or mountain views.

--Lou, if you don't wrap me up in a plastic bag, and put me out on the sidewalk for the Department of Sanitation you will be spitting on my memory and everything I stand for.

--You got it! What about last rites

--Don't patronize me, you son of a bitch. Put your hand over my heart. What do you feel?

--Nothing...! Barely beating!

--My eyes?

--Pupils dilated!

--Skin?

--Morbid. Twenty-nine degrees... Celsius! I pronounce you dead.

--Thank you. Spoken like a true friend. I hereby appoint you as my Executor with complete authority as to the disposition of my mortal remains, and legatee of all my worldly goods, chattels, whatever and wherever situate. As far as I know, as of this moment, these consist of the clothes on my back, a few tools in the shop, my book of poetry, and my diary. Do with them as you wish. I bequeath them to you. As for burial expenses, take me at my word and rest easy with the choice of pauper's field. Then, I'd like it if you were to go atop a mountain--Hell! Stand atop a bench in Bronx Park--and read for me to all ethereal things my poem which starts: --A slight and gentle rain... Do everything as quickly as you can. To think I have taken so much time, space, energy on this planet, to have returned so little is an embarrassment. Here, I will put this all in writing, on the back of this empty six-pack carton. Do you have any objection, or reservations?

--Could you arrange things so it won't take up a weekend?

On love:

Feelings are a rather recent human investment. Consideration of another's feelings the achievement of developing civilization. The commerce of interaction narrow-walled and rigid. The reason for this elemental: The seriousness attached to survival. In business, to succeed continuously, one must crush the skull and cut the jugular with equanimity. Mercy is not to be offered even to the condemned, it could be habit forming, and stupid. Stolidity was case hardened by eons of combat against Nature, unforgiving to all and any who would miscalculate; against Time, irretrievable in the extreme; against Man, carnal, brutal pitiability. Flying in the face of all of this, the ingrained human belligerence against all restraints of any form, manner, ideology. For the same reason Man has freed himself from Earth to explore the Universe by conquering the limitations imposed by space--distance--on travel and communications; he subverts the ignorant arrogance of the subjugation of individual Will by prehistoric politics today called communism, fascism, socialism; and he bursts the constraints of living only for oneself by embracing the fears of his ancestors who spelled life only as lust which allowed the discovery of the ecstasy of sharing called Love. Make no mistake, so far, in this Twentieth Century, love isn't even a close second in importance to sex, and not quite fifth to money. But one can die from it, or lack of it, goodness knows.

--Why, Lou? How can something so marvelous also be so devastating? Why is there no middle ground? We're either indifferent, or passionately consumed. No question, it's a force of unknown origin and depth that manifests itself in a series of tentative detonations--such as puppy love, crushes--until the crescendo reaches the wild and full explosion of a mature love affair. It happens only once, I understand, of that maximum magnitude. Requited or otherwise, it's this experience with love that remains with a person forever as the personification of the romantic ideal to which all other love will be compared, and, naturally, found lacking. A gift is to love again as much. How come, Lou?