Saline Solution (12 page)

A model of three forces suggested itself to describe what happens between two people. At any time we are a function of distance, uncertainty, and complexity; and the fitness of a relationship depends on whether the product of these forces remains a constant. Thus, if there is a great distance between two people - including psychic or emotional or temperamental as well as physical distance - the degree of uncertainty and/or complexity would have to be low. If both distance and uncertainty were large, then complexity would have to be reduced almost to zero if the relationship were to continue successfully.

I wasn't sure whether what I was thinking made sense, and yet I realised that it was as arbitrary to assign the label 'electron' to an energy manifestation as to consider 'complexity' a unit of relationship. It seemed that the proper psychology would turn out to be a poetry of structural appearances.

The problem with marriage, or any fixed long-term relationship, was that habit petrified uncertainty at a single point, distance was shrunk by fear and not allowed its healthy fluctuation, and as a result complexity proliferated past the ability of the people to keep up with the changes. The result was exhaustion, with its sniping, temporary truces, futile impulses to escape, and all the trappings of a long unpopular war.

The role of sex was usually to distort the true appraisal of the actual distance between partners, so that two people could feel quite close when in fact their fucking had them flying apart at astonishing speeds.

Eric and Suzanne had had just that problem.

When I knew him he was working part-time in one of the millions of offices in downtown Manhattan while studying for his doctorate in political science. Suzanne was a secretary, a French Jew with a tight mouth and a morbid fear of impropriety. Eric fell in love with her arse, which was subtly mounded and stood out nicely from her small compact body. Each day he waited for glimpses of Suzanne's arse, watching her as she walked and sat and bent over to pick things up. On the evenings when I saw him, in the midst of a thick rap, he would say, 'There's this chick at the office, and she has the most beautiful arse.' All the while he maintained a civilised surface relationship, going through the mandatory gestures of polite intercourse.

After a few weeks he asked her out to dinner and a movie, and found her a pleasant girl to be with. They found a number of tastes in common, and shortly he was embroiled in infatuation and romance. She reciprocated. They began to talk about living together. They fucked a dozen or so times, enough to be sure that there were no hideous sexual discrepancies. And in the process of all this, he forgot what it was that was driving him, the fixation on her arse. He ceased treating her arse an object, and related to it as part of the body of the woman he was coming to care for.

She moved into his pad. They played out all the routines, the rearrangements, the fondlings. His mind began to wander, involved as he was in his studies and the exigencies of his job, and the paraphernalia of beginning a modern no-contract marriage. And one night, after long foreplay, he ran his finger between her buttocks and found the hole lubricated with the vaginal secretions which had run down from her cunt. Almost unthinkingly, he mounted her from behind, and slowly let his cock penetrate the puckered and only slightly resistant anus. He sank in, as they say, up to the hilt. She reciprocated. And they had a jolly arse-fuck.

But at the moment of orgasm, he said he felt as though the earth were shifting under him. As he put it,
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1 felt like my cock was sticking out in the void and I was coming right on God's nose.'

Eric is heavily leonine in appearance, with shaggy blond hair and powerful shoulders. He is a Plato freak, reading the old boy in Greek. He is one of the few people I know who speaks in complete paragraphs, with footnotes. And he is extremely sensitive to nuance.

No sooner had the sperm left his cock than the entire schema became clear to him. He had no interest in living with this woman, pretending that their lives were intertwined. All he had ever wanted to do was what he had just done, to fuck her in the arse. But he had changed many of the major currents of his life just to accomplish this one small deed. The distance that lay between them, that had not been perceived because the sexual drive imparted a masked intimacy, now sprang forth. The complexity which had seemed so great was instantaneously reduced to a simple fact: he wanted to be alone. And the factor of uncertainty stayed maddeningly the same.

But he immediately suppressed all that he saw. And

continued the farce of living with her.

They both quickly attained that look of thinly disguised unhappiness which is the mark of people who are living together out of fear instead of love. And they became a typical couple. She was still attractive and friendly; he still liked her. But the sense of we-ness imparted by the false appraisal of distance had disappeared. And was now supplanted by a fictional 'us\

For almost two years they continued in this guilty complicity. The longer they persisted, the more their apparent bond was reinforced by the social function. His friends began inviting 'them' out, not just him. The same happened on her side. People began to think of Eric-and-Suzanne as an entity. To accommodate the lie, they decorated the apartment, served fine cheese at their parties, went to films and built up a private language based on their short mutual appreciation of those art works. In short, they became an attractive hip couple.

The dues they paid for unhappiness was grief. After the historic night of the arse-fuck, he lost the edge of his desire for her. As his energy dropped, she retreated somewhat into her former characterological frigidity. While they enjoyed fucking, it no longer transported them to any but the most banal realms. He never fucked her in the arse again.

They settled into a middle-American sexual routine, and he entered more deeply into his studies. He became tediously fascinated with the machinations of Athenian grain merchants and their relation to Platonic thought. She grew bored, and got involved in the freedom rides which were just beginning to become chic among the New York liberal left. She spent her evenings mimeographing pronouncements and announcements.

As was to be expected, she met a black Marxist who had no illusions about what aspect of Suzanne was meant to be most directly appreciated. And one evening she offered no resistance as he pushed her back on a couch, lifted her skirt, and slid his cock into her very wet cunt. He turned his friends on to the Phenomenon, and she shortly became the resident pincushion of SNCC's One Hundred and Twenty-Fifth Street office.

It took Eric a few months to learn about it, not from any external evidence, but from sensing the internal changes in her. As she pulled further away from him, his emotional involvement with her heated up. He even regained his lust for her. But his heart wasn't in it. And when one morning she returned from a night of being steadily fucked by five of freedom's young stalwarts, all Eric could manage was a convulsion of self-pity.

She left that afternoon, and two days later he snapped to, went to the Y for a steam bath and a swim, ate a steak dinner, and got soaringly drunk on cold tap beer. He was out of the bag he had sewn himself in. It had taken two years.

Is the hole more than the sum of its hearts? A cunt and cock can interact, but can a man and a woman relate? Two dykes walked along the beach, one soft and brown, like a soul sloop, the other thrusting and blonde, the sighted land. In the eyes of the second was a fierce pride, a lonely painful joy, and with such sure intelligent understanding of exactly what kind of thing the two of them were that I felt a pang of envy. But perhaps in a few hours they would be sniping at one another with well-adjusted missiles of hatred.

The couple is the insignia of civilisation rampant, which has pulled war, exploitation, dense stupidity, and lies from its historical sleeve. The casual logic is implacable. For some false concept of relationship, some erroneous notion of what a family is, have come the good citizens, the upright parishioners; the fodder for convents and armies, the grease for the bears of civil law. The marchers, the boosters, the flag-wavers, the voters, the workers in the factories of the rulers, who send their children to the regimented schools, who dress the same, eat the same, have no thoughts except the reflexes patterned by the concerted conditioning of millennia.

At the meeting, the militant homosexual stood up and demanded his right to serve in the army.

When fags want to go to war, the murder of the foetus achieves a new dimension. If it could survive, if it had a world to come into, there might be some cause for joy. But its mother is a tired and passive woman who knows no other form of relationship to a man than to sink into his shadow. And its father is embarked on some mad experiment to relive all the animal archetypal historical forms through the use of his organ and orifices.

While the four of us had performed our ritual, sucking and fucking in suspended silence, the only sounds being the sighs of slippage and suction, I became the essence of a pig, wallowing in dirt, eating what no one else will touch, looking with inward-turned eye at the foolishness of the two-legged ones who are forever shooting noises out of their mouths and indulging in silted pantomimes of behaviour they really don't want to take part in. In utmost realism then, I saw that the world will ever be ruled by the stunned insensate, by the worthless and the petty and the mean. From Rameses to Nixon, a line of bestial mediocrity. And there is no chance that the species will change it ways. The governments of the world will continue to exemplify and magnify the violence, greed, ignorance, and unswerving hostility to all forms of sexual love which have proven the identifying marks of manwomankind throughout recorded time.

There is nowhere on the horizon of macrocosmic social events the slightest glimmer of intelligence, the faintest hope for sensitivity to the nature of reality. We have become nuclear lemmings, racing for the final cliff, and the most articulate among us can do nothing but sound the klaxons of doom or else attempt to further hypnotise the populace and their leaders into believing that it is all business as usual.

And before the execution of the monsters who run the states which are entered into the final unholy war, look in the mirror and see the face of the one who still says love when he means possession, who still pretends that it is possible to claim the body and affection of another human being to the utter exclusion of every one else on the surface of the planet. Look into the eyes of the one who holds the knife to his unborn child's throat and with a welter of rationalisations pushes the point forward and dispatches that life with all the efficiency of a jailor executing a political prisoner.

A man approached across the sand. He was almost sixty, but his body was still firm. He had a white goatee and wore a golfer's cap. He should have been wearing knickers.

He cruised me to a halt. I stopped, through sheer surprise. And he launched us into the ritual of proposition. As I said the necessary words, I calculated my measure of fleshly desire. Nothing came through. He didn't excite anything in me.

'Don't you find me the least bit attractive?' he asked when I was forced to remove his hand from my breast.

'With me,' I said, 'it's a matter of chemistry. It's nothing personal. If I had felt a spark I wouldn't care how old you were, or how ugly.'

'I'm only fifty-seven.'

'Please,' I pouted, 'do not make me sad.'

'At least take a walk with me,' he said, 'into the woods.'

'Don't torture yourself,' I said. But he made a gesture, an almost inward movement, and for the length of a hesitation I felt an attraction to him. It passed quickly, but not before he had slipped under the curtain and began to lead me by the arm towards the dunes. In deference to the deftness of his action, I let myself be guided. He handled me with amazing grace, and I felt like a great lady being escorted across the ballroom to meet the count. My heart fluttered and the tiniest wave of faintness made me trip.

'Be careful,' he said.

I looked at him. Suddenly I saw myself as this foolish young man being taken to the woods to be fucked by this accomplished melancholy satyr. I began an internal resistance.

He did a fairly good job of maintaining some shreds of elegance while he peered eagle-eyed for a private spot. He took me behind a clump of bushes. We could not be seen. I was angry. He reached for my shoulder. 'I told you to save yourself the trouble,' I spat at him. But I sat down.

He was tender. He reached behind me and broke off a stalk from the plant growing there. He crushed it between his fingers. He held it up for me to smell. I was catapulted back to childhood. 'It's the base for sarsaparilla,' he said.

He told me the names of all the things growing there, and said he was a botanist, and held my hand and looked at me with absurdly serious eyes. He reached forward to kiss me. Uhaccountably, I was repulsed. His mouth twitched.

'I'm really very sorry,' I said. He struggled to hold me down, but I stood. I turned. I let him look at my arse, at the pleasure treasure he wanted and would not have. I wanted to hurt him, with pins. He clutched my calf. I shook him off. He grabbed at my wrist. I began to move off, dragging him.

'Don't make a scene,' I thought.

I stopped. He looked up, dog-eyed. Then, mustering all his dignity in a swoop, he raised himself to one knee, bent his head forward in the military manner, and kissed my hand, I threw my other hand up to my forehead, the knuckles in a vertical line above the left eyebrow. I let him kiss my fingers and my palm. He inserted his tongue into the centre of my palm. I felt ravished. Symbolic fucking had its own forms of virginity. He squeezed my hand one time, and let it drop. I walked over the dunes, back onto the beach, blushing furiously, hoping no one had seen me, was now looking at me.