Saline Solution (10 page)

I rolled out of the hut and ran down the beach, stumbling and laughing, tumbling in the sand. I had a torn blanket over my shoulders and I picked up a pointed stick, holding it like a spear. For a moment I tripped out of context. I forgot the matrix of time and place and stood quite naked in the nowness of the then. I felt quite free and fierce. My stomach growled. My face held an expression of furious joy. And a truth was revealed to me concerning the human condition: to live one must eat, and to eat one must kill. No equivocation.

I returned to the shelter and found Francis and Bertha lying in an embrace, their hands on one another's genitals. I watched them for a while, and then she saw me standing there. A wave of hatred passed from her to me. 'You too,' I thought, 'Grab you and fuck you right here. Then stab you with my spear.' I blinked and turned away.

We went on to the Grove to get something to eat. As we approached its boundaries, I began to camp it up. Francis was even more reserved than he had been last time, and was condescending to the gay citizens, putting on a manshield for Bertha's benefit. I lapsed into an Italian accent, finding vicious pleasure in my role, in my distance. Meta-theatre was the ultimate refuge.

Francis knew what I was doing but was tied to Bertha. He got angry. 'Stop talking in dialect, man,' he said. 'What do you think you are, a madam from Naples?'

'Yes, darling,' I said. 'Do you want a good time? Or are you really satisfied with that naive stringbean hanging on your arm?' I was letting all my bitchiness show and

Bertha was no match for my age and experience and mescaline energy. We sat on the restaurant sun deck and ordered sandwiches. 'I have no money with me,' I said. 'I'll take care of it,' Francis said.

I went into the Sea Shack john, vamping and talking to myself. I saw my face in the mirror and was amazed. Hair brown, cheeks red, eyes flashing, lips full. I was beautiful, the way a woman can be beautiful.

'So this is what they see,' I said to the glass. 'This is what they desire, the fools who want to make love to me, who want to fuck me, to have me moan in their arms. It is the beauty they want to suck up, to feast upon. Then let them have it!'

And on saying that I looked down and found two dollar bills crumpled at my feet under the urinal. It was one of those coincidences that lend poetry to causality.

After the lunch, when the bill arrived, I threw the two dollars on the table. 'I thought you didn't have any money,' Bertha said. 'I found some,' I said, loading the words with suggestiveness. Francis was impressed, sitting at the round wooden table overlooking the ocean, his shoulder-length blond hair forming a mantle for his head, his square-cut beard the most prominent feature of his lean six-foot frame, his blue eyes sparkling in an ironic glitter, while his dinosaur-mouth girl friend breathed flames of envy over my aura.

Back at the house, things were festering nicely. Lucinda had left to see an old friend in Ocean Bay Park, and three strangers were sitting in the living room. I looked into their eyes and saw confusion. There were people everywhere, and everywhere the people had one or another game they want to suck others into, to compensate for their own emptiness. Everyone had a private plot that was projected onto the world; if you peered into their souls, you could see what sort of actors and actresses they were advertising for. I didn't mind acting in someone else's movie, but the people here were vague about their desires, they were just groping, neither open to the flow of events, nor ready to impose their will upon the flux.

'You've never seen me naked, have you?' said Donna, sidling up to me. 'Why don't you go on up to my room and wait for me there?'

'Don't forget that she is mad,' I said to myself as I climbed the stairs. 'You've never let that stop you before,' said one of my other voices.

Donna had so fused her internal fantasy life into a cutting tool for dealing and dividing up the world around her that she seemed perfectly balanced. If one stepped into her game, he would buy into a razor-slicing trip in which he was never sure whether his partner was a friend or raving enemy. I attempted to stay neutral by applauding her act each time I saw it so as to distract her from the fact that I was still outside of it.

I lay on the red shag rug, lit a stick of incense, and filled a pipe with hashish. Within a few minutes, she came in. She stood over me and arched her back, forcing her great breasts out.

'I used to be whipped by the nuns when I was eleven,' she said. 'They were jealous of my body.' And the crazy-lights went on in her eyes.

I got an erection and took off my pants, all the while watching her. She lay down next to me. 'I can't fuck you,' she said. 'I just thought it would be nice, you know, friendly, if you saw me without clothes once before the end of the summer.'

All the warning signals went off. Lucinda was still asleep. And if she woke up, she would not come up here.

'You can do anything you want with me,' I said.

She stood up and slowly peeled off her pants and blouse and brassiere and panties. She had an excellent body, but lacked the fullness of her narcissism. If she could let go, she would be one of the most sensuous women in the world.

But now it was merely curvaceous flesh, full thighs, and all the rest of it.

'Close your eyes,' she said.

The next sensation was that of her hand in a mink glove, rubbing my genitals. I began to stir. In the distance I could hear the noises of the house. Bernard and Josephine talked in the room down the hall. He was the son of Jewish refugees and now sported a doctorate in economics, and was writing a meaningless book on the statistical aspects of welfare in the United States. His wife was a lantern-jawed simpleton with a lovely arse. They always talked as though there were a surly child in the corner of the room listening to them, forcing them to some obscure form of proper behaviour.

'If you were clean, I would suck you,' Donna said.

'I'm clean,' I said.

She threw herself on her back, her legs opening. 'Oh, I can't,' she sighed, and in the same breath, 'I like men to be rough with me.'

Tedium threatened.

I considered the situation. She was clearly working out some baroque schoolgirl fantasy drama, operating on a very low level of consciousness and upset by her own directions. There could be no passion in this scene, no humour, no richness of contact. On the other hand, I felt an honest affection for her, and was quite taken by her body.

I bit her nipples, hard enough to hurt but not cause any damage. She brought her knees up towards her chest in a reflex motion. I wondered whether medical science might not add a new test to its list of knee-jerk and Babinski responses, and call it the Surrender Reflex, measuring to what degree a man or woman has all the orgasm pathways in good working order.

I climbed on her, pinning her arms with my knees, and forced my cock to her mouth. She played the conventional role, whipping her head from side to side, moaning, 'No, don't please don't,' and the rest of it. I grabbed her hair by the roots and tried to pry her mouth open with my cock. But her jaw was clamped tight, and in a few minutes I got bored with the theatre. I got up quickly, began to put my pants back on, and edged away from the bed. 'Well, Donna, it's been interesting, but I have to go.'

'Don't get angry.'

'I'm not angry.' I waited.

She snaked up off the floor and pulled me back down. 'I'll do something nice for you,' she said, and rolled me over on my back and sat on my now limp cock. 'I can't fuck now, but I'll rub against you until you come.'

And it became rather pleasant. Me lying there, Donna pressing her cunt and fleshy buttocks against my groin, the sunlight coming in through the window, and all the other crazies in the house doing their own thing. But in the midst of it all, she said, 'I hope Jack doesn't come in.'

The hairs on the back of my neck tingled. 'Jack?' I said. 'Who's Jack?'

'He's my lover,' she said, looking dreamily off into space. 'He's very jealous and he always carries a gun.'

'I warned you she was crazy,' said the mocking voice inside me. 'Now you're in for it. Paying the final price for the most idiotic act.'

'Do you think he might come in, now?' I said.

'Oh, he's probably on his way.'

I sat up. She pushed me back down. 'You're not afraid, are you?'

'No,' I lied. And lay back down. She began her motion again.

The problem now showed itself to be extremely simple: could I come before Jack did?

Donna began rapping again, a surrealistic mixture of early childhood memory and grisly stories of how Jack had beaten up men who had flirted with her, all the while rubbing, rubbing her now heated cunt lips against my cock. And I realised that she wasn't in any contact with the sexual act, but with the danger, with the illicitness of things. I put in an emergency call to the gonads to speed things up, and while she whispered her garbled insanities and smiled vacuously at my squirmings, I pushed against her and urged myself on, 'Come on, hurry up, hurry up.' And finally I felt heat, the rush, and the spurt. The white sperm spilled over my pubic hair and belly.

We both froze for a moment, then I rolled out from under and got dressed very quickly. Engine whistles were going off in my mind.

She got up and we stood there for a moment. T hope we can really fuck sometimes,' she said.

'Sure,' I said.

Another moment of stillness. 'Well, I have to go.'

'Goodbye,' she said, standing there, naked, jiggling, mad, luscious.

Downstairs, Lucinda had returned. I kissed her and finally made the second cup of coffee. We sat on the deck for a while, smoking, watching the day put itself together. 'You were in Donna's room?' said Francis.

I glowered into my cup. 'Yeah, she wanted me to help her move her dresser.'

He raised one eyebrow. 'Oh really? She had me up there for the same reason yesterday.' I looked up and caught his eyes. Not only had I been a fool, but I was merely one in a long line. The two women exchanged glances, but Francis and I guarded all access points to our inner meaning. They could suspect, but had no handle to grab on to. I enjoyed the male camaraderie of the shared secret, and for a brief instant I felt a rare peace in just being human. The absolute clarity of the sky and soothing murmur of the waves had erased most of the insistent awareness of the grotesque parody that has come to inhabit the words 'only human'. I found myself smiling to myself, and responding to the small play of affection on Francis's mouth, and so much good feeling flooded the space that even Lucinda's and Bertha's suspicions melted, and they joined us in our moment of quilted mirth.

Where was the fear now? How quickly the circumstance changed; what had been the jagged edge of terror became a sweet sharing of love. But more often in my life, the trend had been in the other direction.

My first time in therapy began with overtures of noble humanity and ended in the emotional gutter. My therapist was a tiny woman of about forty-five, and a litde too heavy to be considered anything but fat. Her approach was an eclectic grab-bag of traditional theories and avant garde techniques, with a strong neo-Reichian bias. The whole thing was submerged in great bowls of chicken soup which she dispensed as easily as advice on cold winter days.

One day, after almost a year of opening my heart to her, and letting her run all kinds of breathing and body trips on me, I looked up from some convoluted rap I was into and saw her gazing at me with lustrous eyes, warmth and affection pouring from her huge breasts. I was taken aback.

'Why, Sarah,' I said, 'you're beautiful.'

She got up and came over to me. 'Thank God,' she said, 'I thought you'd never notice.' And kissed me on the mouth.

I was shocked, and froze in the chair. I still had the romantic notion that therapy was a more sublime mode of existence than just plain life, and that a therapist was above the mundane desires which plagued the rest of us. But when she put her hand on my cock, all my evaluations dissolved and I responded emphatically to the gesture.

'Not here,' she said, 'I make it a practice never to fuck in the office.' Her words were like cold water. They stated most clearly that she did this often. But I suppressed the thought. 'I'll come to your place, later, she said.

The first fuck was so overwhelming that I didn't experience it. Sarah was goddess and Mother Earth and the spirit of Freud and my personal ticket to salvation all in one, and when she swarmed over me with all of her bodies and minds, I blew all my fuses and lost consciousness of what I was doing. Some whispered words remain in my memory, and the feeling that the skin of our bellies had disappeared and our entrails were spilling and coiling inextricably into each other, binding us together like Siamese twins. But when she was finally lying peacefully by my side and saying, 'That was wonderful,' in my ear, I realised that I had maintained an erection and come in her without being aware of it.

For a month or so, we attempted to continue the therapy and the fucking, but sex was too strong for the fragile bonds of our professional relationship. And as soon as I ceased being her patient, the metamorphosis took place. In therapeutic sessions, if I had said, 'I hate you,' to her, she would patiently help me contact the feeling, scream it or kick it out, and then examine the aspects of its causes and contingencies. But once we became pure lovers, any expression of negative feeling on my part was taken as a personal attack on her, and she would get sullen or hurt. She lost all objectivity concerning the fact that I had a right to my feelings, and would whine, 'Why do you hate me? Please don't hate me.'