Saline Solution (2 page)

I lowered myself onto her. All the bulges down the front of me found hollows along her back to nestle in. My knees into the backs of her knees, her buttocks into my groin, my belly into the small of her back, my chest on her spine. I reached under her and worked one breast into each of my hands, feeling the thick pleasure of the soft glandular pressure of her tits. I relaxed my full weight on her and we tacitly abandoned ourselves to the exclusivity of one another's satisfaction. It was as though fucking were a truce, a spacetime in which we could allay alienation and find a temporary comfort in the union of our physical communication. In fucking, the language is basic, the dualities are clear: yes, no; brutal, tender; in, out; agression, passivity; and on down the entire ontology of experience. In fucking, the play of mood captures at least the form, if not the essence, of an extended gesture, which subsumes music, incorporates dance, and attains to poetry.

I let my limp cock fall past the lowest bulge of her buttocks. The tip of it nuzzled the edge of her cunt lips. Her hair tickled my skin. I slid my hands down the front of her, over the cave of her ribcage and her vulnerable stomach, catching the bulge of her in my palms, and began to play at her cunt with my fingers, scratching and pressing at the sensitive folds. Then I slipped one finger into where the wetness began, and she gasped down the entire length of her body. My cock hardened.

I put my fingers under the shaft and pressed it against the whole slit of cunt. My pelvis began to rock, forcing my prick to slide as it grew larger between my hands and the hot deep opening between her legs. So many times, when I was younger, I would be embarrassed at this moment because I hadn't achieved an instant erection, and that feeling would short-circuit any chance of success. But I learned in time that there are few things more erotic for a woman than to feel the process whereby a man gets hard, and to have her cunt gently pried apart with one hand while a cock is guided in with the other.

She moaned once and I felt myself become completely stiff. I was now pushing my cock against her clitoris, inflaming and teasing her. She started to move, trying to capture the head of my cock with her cunt. I became elusive, and the game was on. 'Please,' she said, 'please fuck me.' The poverty of the dialogue found its complement in the richness of the sensations we were feeling. Also, she knew that I frustrated her only in order to allow her to build to higher levels of energy. She moved her arse into me with shameless supplication, and I grew giddy with the waves of heat that coursed through me, melting all my postures and images. And when I could stand the tension no longer, her cunt found me and I sank into her with a loud cry of pleasurepain, and began to swim in the hot and thick and delicious recesses of her body.

She came up on her knees and stretched her torso out, her arms reaching ahead of her, offering her exposed centre to me, to fuck at my own rhythm and speed. She was content to remain still and let the sensations wash over her. I rode her for almost an hour, going through dozens of changes, sometimes smashing brutally into her, and then just letting the tip of my cock gently nudge the edges of her inner lips; or swinging from side to side in erratic patterns, and then lying quietly, feeling my organ throb in her depths like a submarine in a grotto listening for echoes. I pumped into her with even strokes, like a carpenter sawing wood, and exploded into her like an epileptic having a fit; I rose up and hit into her at a sharp downward angle, and then sank down to slip my cock in from underneath and erupt into the roof of her cunt. I fucked the smell of her, and the sight of her, and the possibilities of her. I pushed her down so she lay with her legs together and extended, and sat on her thighs, my knees clasping her arse, and swung into her closed cunt, pulling her buttocks apart, putting my fingers into her arsehole, between her thighs, and around my cock, so that my cock and hands and frenzy all fucked her at once. I put her on her right side and lifted one leg, watching my cock plunge into the great gap which was now all wet hair and trembling heat. She had four orgasms.

And when I got physically tired, and bored with the cycles of excitement and detachment, I had her kneel again as though she were in church praying, and then prostrate herself fully forward from the waist, her spine bent, her belly hanging, her cunt at an angle for deepest penetration, and I let myself spin off into an unobstructed movement, my pelvis shuddering rapidly as I let the energy ripple freely through my body, enjoying the crashing pleasure of the way her cunt caught my cock and held it as I slid in and out of her, and the pose of abject submission she took before me, and I let the sperm bubble through and flush out into her as I yelled in release, a hairy solipsist in the throes of a loveless orgasm.

Gradually she let herself sink full-length on the bed, and I lay on top of her. We were in exactly the same position we had held before we started to fuck. It made everything that had happened in between seem futile. But that also seemed true of life. In all of the times we had had sex, I had never let go in her arms. I always performed, not in the adolescent sense of trying to be the best fuck she ever had, but in the more insidious way of never losing my selfconsciousness. Both in and out of bed I kept my distance, and we shared no existential rushes.

Secretly we both played the game of pretending that each of us had the power to save the other from dying.

I suddenly became very aware of the body lying underneath me, of this human being now thinking her thoughts as I was thinking mine, perhaps as aware as I of the gap between us, and wondered whether there were such a thing as love which could erase the essential strangeness of the other. I could imagine myself after forty years looking into Lucinda's eyes and saying, 'I never did know who you were, really.' But of course, that would be no more than I would say to myself. Freud was wrong. The opposite of Eros is not Thanatos, but Absurdity.

We got up and moved randomly around the apartment, and I drifted into the kitchen to make tea, finding a therapeutic calmness in the orderliness of the ritual. 'Let's bring the radio in to the city next time,' Lucinda said.

We had taken all our electronic props to Fire Island, and when we came into the city for a few days we felt like junkies whose supply had been cut off. The thoroughness with which the noise made by the media had permeated our sense of environment was chilling. Once, when Lucinda was bitching about not having the stereo in the city, I launched into a long rap on the value of returning to one's inner resources and she shot back, '
What
inner resources?'

I sipped the tea and looked out the window to the apartment building across the alley. The woman who was lying in bed, whatever time we looked, was still there, still wearing a slip. 'She's still there,' I said. 'I envy her.' Lucinda said, 'She doesn't need anything but sleep.'

'Why don't you call Francis and Bertha?' I said. 'Find out what time we should pick them up on Sunday.'

'What about that Ireland thing?' she said.

'It's just a whim.'

'He seemed so serious about it.'

'I've known Francis for nine years,' I said. 'He's had hundreds of enthusiasms. They're always brilliant ideas, and he is always carried away by them. And they burst within a few days, leaving anyone who changed any plans on his account a little discomfited.'

We were going to take them with us to the Island for the rest of the season. Bertha was his new girl of several months' standing, and the four of us had spent an evening together smoking dope and tripping out on travel and politics.

'Ireland's a beautiful place,' Francis had said. 'And with no history of imperialism. They're as fucked up as anybody else as people, but they've got a pretty clean national conscience.'

Lucinda got very excited. 'Yes,' she had said, 'let's get out of the country.' I knew she was thinking about the baby.

I came away from the window, and lit a cigarette. 'I don't think there's any point in going to Ireland,' I said. 'There's no peace there either. The human sickness is our addiction to fear, and we pass it on genetically. The Irish seek refuge in slavery as much as any other people. They're
Catholics
, for Christ's sake.'

'For Christ's sake?' she said.

'Not for Christ's sake. That's the problem. They've taken to religion the way the Germans took to National Socialism. But organisation is only the outer shell of fascism. And what would the four of us do there, anyway? Mope around like characters out of Lawrence? I can barely manage living with myself, and it's almost impossible with you. I'm a pervert by most standards. And you're pregnant and Bertha is into fidelity and Francis is pretending he's straight. There's just no point.'

'Why do you make things so complicated?' she asked. 'Why can't we just go to Europe like ordinary people?'

I snorted. '
Ordinary
people? I don't know any ordinary people.'

She went into the bathroom again. This time she closed the door. I poured another cup of tea. It would be several hours until I got sleepy. I didn't want to go out. I wondered how I would fill the time.

II

When, for whatever reason, a man and woman begin to live together, to share the intimacy of sex, their first contract is for exclusivity of genital contact. At first they seem to believe, and later force themselves to adhere to the notion that this human being now in constant geographical proximity has been qualitatively transformed into some property of oneself. A woman's cunt is her own, but her husband will not say so. The pristine articulated bond, arbitrary but conscious, soon succumbs to the corrosive power of habit, and the two of them are left with a smoldering possessiveness which is often tidied up into brisk, smiling hostility. The resulting years, no matter how varied in content, are riddled with the tension inherent in the psycho-emotional game known as marriage.

The most invidious myth of our civilisation is the idea that any form of social contract can substitute for unrelenting moment-to-moment awareness by each individual. Lucinda and I attempted to laugh in the face of necessity by assuming a relationship in which all the emotional glue of attachment would be dissolved by acid sophistication. But life has a way of brushing our paradigms

aside.

We went back to the Island. There was immediate friction between Francis and Donna, the woman who had rented and sublet the house to us and the half-dozen other summer groupers. We dumped our bags and went into Ocean Beach, figuring that the worst way to deal with the problem would be through confrontation. We walked the narrow paths in silence, thankful to be in a place where no cars were allowed.

We went into the ice cream parlour. The vibrations were jagged and intense. I watched a teenage girl, blonde spaghettini hair, roundly fleshy hips, a soft square arse, and a look of hungry innocence in her eyes. I sat at a table with Lucinda, facing Francis and Bertha. All round us teenage America did its vapid dance. The juke box played a lament for the students shot at Kent State. 'Four dead in O-O-hio . . .' The words snaked out of a very polished rhythm section. Three pinball machines let off raucous metallic shudders. A tall, big-shouldered fifteen-year-old strode across the length of the place, wearing a jacket with 'Mobile Environment Engineer' written across the back over the Power-to-the-People fist done in bright red.

'It's amazing how in the United States every phenomenon of the left is immediately recast into a right-wing mould,' Francis said, his eyes riveted to the young Ecological Storm Trooper.

The girl I was watching looked up and our eyes flashed. Such a sweet little cunt, bulging the jeans out. And how aware of it she was, and how she said yes with such burning naivete. My stomach dropped and I tingled clear down to my toes. Lucinda saw what was happening and feigned a look of benign amusement. I smiled insipidly at her, suddenly and fiercely hating her presence.

'It's actual theatre,' said Francis. 'I mean, it
grips
my attention.' He brought his hand up and clutched at the air, making a fist. He was a painter, but I suspected that

his true art lay in poetry or dance.

'It can't be painted,' he said. 'It has to be put on videotape.' He paused. 'Do you realise that painting is the last art to lose its atemporality?' I stood in salute and went to pick up the sodas.

By the time I came back, I had lost contact with the nymphet who would cry so beautifully the first time I made her realise the utter reality of the cock which lambasted the hard rubber walls of her tight shiny twat. I tried to spot her in the crowd and saw her staring into the eyes of a pre-teenage hyponist, who had sat her down and was ripping off her mind with his rap. Her face was rapt in an approximation of awe, and she was squirming in her chair.

'Ruin,' I thought. 'If I had just taken her earlier and made love to her on the beach, she would not have fallen into the hands of the Scientologists.'

The summer season was coming to a close, and the air of unreality which is the Island's major sociological feature had caught my mind. I was ready to freak out, but I felt trapped by Lucinda. Oddly, I didn't miss any particular freedom of behaviour, but was limited in the scope of my mind. As usual, this condition was accompanied by an increasing frequency of deja vu experience, one of which surrounded me at that moment. 'I'm going back to the house,' I said.

We returned to find the other groups milling around. One family was in the small alcove off the living room. The man was a teacher of physics in high school. His total understanding of the universe seemed reduced to whatever answers appeared in the back of the textbook. His wife was a woman whose face I had no trouble forgetting after each of the hundreds of times I saw her. Their son had all the moody craftiness of the ten-year-old. And their dog, named Hot Dog, was absolutely paranoid and would bark at people for hours after they'd come into the room. They were sitting around in a fuzzy silence.