Saline Solution (21 page)

'The door is shut, locked for a long time, perhaps forever,' I said. 'We're locked in a race between murder and ultimate orgasm. Relationship between a man and a woman is possible only at a distance, even when they are glued to one another's bodies.'

There was a moment of awkwardness. One of our agreements was never to talk in terms of the future. I hedged a bit. 'You'll be at the office every day?' I said. 'One to six every day,' she said. A wordless message flitted between our eyes.

I walked the seven blocks back to Lucinda's house.

XVI

The day begins with light stirring and dreams dispersing. Several moments of stunning clarity rush through the entire body and the morning's first tars form as consciousness climbs into the tractor seat to begin another cycle of work. There are flashes of sun-drenched islands and brooding desert plains, whispers of a state of being which transcends the stiffness of the lower back. But plans crop up, and the day's duties present themselves. Then one remembers that one wants to leave the woman one is sleeping next to, or that death is unavoidable, or that the morning paper will provide yet another record of manwomankind's mammoth stupidity. Fantasy crystallises and from its vacuum core a cloud of ambient charges radiate to suffuse all reality with a sense of heightened significance. Then she wakes up, and the first adjustment to another is made, a change that will happen so many times in the crowded city that within an hour one will cease to react to the other humans on the street; they will have no more importance than street signs. Breakfast next, and the necessities perform. Food is ingested, digested, evacuated. Breath continues. The radio, the first look out of the window into the poison air, the sound of car horns, the vibration of mindless commerce. And through all the growing Grand Guignol of life, the leitmotif of sex. Who have I fucked, who am I fucking, who will I fuck? Which cunt? Which cock? Which new spin on the carousel of sensation?

The day descends like a backdrop, a grey gritty lull between the poles of healing unconsciousness. And one by one the persona appear, each to do his or her dance of mortality.

LUCINDA: Her belly began to show the flush of pregnancy. She was to go into the hospital in three days. We both dealt with it as a non-fact, approaching it obliquely, averting our faces.

'Do you want me to drive you to the hospital?' I asked.

'Don't worry about it,' she said.

'I'm not worrying,' I said, my anger flashing. 'I just asked a simple question.' We were doing the kind of manwoman fighting that had been largely absent during the early months of our living together: the woman speaks in terms of her feeling; the man objects to the words she uses; each resents the insensitivity of the other; lines of recalcitrance are drawn; both settle into a lightly venomous silence.

The war will never end.

'It'll be better when it's over,' she said, making the first overture to neutralise the friction. 'You're only guilty before you've committed the crime. Once it's done, you are free of it.'

'That's very Jewish,' I said.

'Except for the baby,' she said. 'Do you ever think of it in there? What it will look like? How it will smile? That's a human being, don't you understand!' Suddenly her eyes were wild and her hair sprang out. She had leapt from calmness to fury without even touching hysteria.

'Bravo,' I said.

'Why are you being so hateful?' she said. We were back

at it again.

It was necessary, then, to fuck her in the arse. The tension between us had reached critical levels, and would have to be discharged. We could either stand there and lacerate one another with words, or we could throw the switch to route the tracks into the sexual realm. I walked up to her and grabbed her sharply by the shoulders. I twisted her torso so that she was simultaneously turned away from me and brought to her knees. I pushed her down onto the floor.

'Don't move,' I said.

I got the K-Y, pulled her housecoat up to reveal her bare arse, and lubricated the hole. The coldness of the act was thrilling, and her submission to it excited me terribly. Of course, it was her excitement also, for she lay there in catatonic bliss waiting to be had.

I fucked her as though she were a corpse, still warm. No life in her, dead, gone beyond any possible recall. Nonexistent. Finished. And I fucked her body, grinding the last rub of pleasure ever to be had from her, and with ignominy.

The time until the baby's execution could be counted in hours.

JESSICA: I saw her at the loft where she works as a go-go girl for the city's newest arm of Esalen. We went up to the roof and looked ten floors down to the street of trucks and labouring men. She sat on the ledge.

'I'm afraid of the edge,' I said.

'So am I,' she said, and let one leg dangle into space. My stomach lurched. She leaned over to peer straight down and then turned to me. 'I like you because I can let you be, I have no program for you in my mind. And so you constantly surprise me.'

She looked healthy and neat, and her eyes were filled with a liquid vivacity. I flashed the night before, and remembered how it felt to rub the back of my hands over her entire crotch, beginning between her buttocks and coming up the fur of her cunt to her pubic bone.

'It can't be death you're afraid of,' she said. 'Death is the end, absolutely, you know. How can you fear that?'

'When is your vacation?' I asked.

'Except in America,' she said, 'Here, death is a smiling mortician.'

'We can try Canada,' I said, 'or Morocco.' I frowned. 'You see, the problem is that we have forgotten even what it is like to tell the truth. And sooner or later, we lapse into total ignorance. And then we live our lives by reflex, simple reaction to external stimuli. What if I pushed you, now?'

Her eyes shone. 'Can you imagine the fall? That glorious rush, the knowledge, the
knowledge
of it? And the split-second before hitting. Fully alive, fully alert, never more conscious, and realising the actuality of the end. And then. Nothing?'

Unaccountably I became quite frightened. 'I have to go,' I said.

As we descended I began to wallow in a growing pool of tenderness. I was close to experiencing something like an emotion. I found that I was saying to myself, 'Be careful,' over and over again as I manoeuvred my way down the iron ladder to the fire escape.

'Have you seen
Performance
yet?' I asked.

'No,' she said.

'It's about the best film ever made,' I said. 'It eclipses the truth entirely. And in the darkness it brings about, the unknown is illuminated.'

'What's it about?' she said.

'It's a love story,' I said.

FRANCIS AND BERTHA: I dropped by their place. They reeked of intimacy. As soon as I stepped inside, the vibrations became sharp-edged, pointed, triangular. Their new obsession was a trip to the coast in a few months. 'The four of us can go together,' Francis said, sliding down the

wave of his emotional opacity.

'She doesn't like me,' I said pointing at Bertha. 'Can't you fucking understand that yet?' He was silent. 'And I don't want to have any pressure from anyone concerning the scope and variety of my sex life. If you two want to one-to-one it between the sheets, you have my encouragement, but not my recommendation.'

Bertha came up and stood abreast of us. 'You'd better make up your mind whether you want to go with him or not. Because if he goes, I don't.'

Francis looked at us blinking amazement. 'You two can't be serious,' he said.

'Oh, it's real,'T said. 'This is who we are and there's no point in trying to be reasonable about it.'

'But this is insane,' he said.

'Well, it's not like the nuns described it, that's for sure,' said Bertha. The reference to our common nemesis broke the tension and we smiled at one another all around.

'This is the way of it,'.I continued. 'It's the same with the three as with two, only more complex, with heavier energies. We're only charges of electricity. We repel one another; we attract one another. We buzz, we flash, we hum, we crackle. And then our ridiculous minds attempt to find some significance in the random patterns we effect. And there is none. We do what we must do by virtue of our structure, and we form our opinions about it in the process. So, go to California with the chick. I'll probably meet you there.'

There was a long moment of silence during which Francis struggled with his heartbeat.

DONALD AND FELIX: Some of the fullest moments of conscious ecstasy have come as I was imbedded between their twin needs, sinking into a violet-black felt passageway and soaring down toward a golden door which opened into an ageless eye which has seen all light.

After our Central Park encounter, Felix had suggested a larewell party tor Donald and now we met to begin the evening. It was the first time I had been with them on the street, and they were both dressed in their straight-wo rid clothes, while I hung between them in tight jeans and t-shirt. 'I feel like a trick/ I said, and we all laughed.

Suddenly, the mood changed. All the strangeness we had ever felt with one another disappeared. I looked from one to the other with admiration and affection. These were men with whom I had shared the most intimate of physical experiences, and yet never opened to. And now we were like old friends, teasing. I realised with great relief that the whole world of gay experience was accessible to me. I could make reference and be understood. The area of my personality which is ordinarily kept under wraps burst forth, and I found myself loquacious and bubbly, almost to the point of camp.

'Tonight I'm gay,' I thought. 'I'm being taken for an expensive dinner and am exchanging amusing homosexual small talk down Seventy-first Street. I am in the gay world without having had to join any organisation or make any compromise with my integrity. I am just as much me now as I am at any time of the day in any other circumstances. Doing a homosexual scene doesn't mean being a homosexual.' I felt elated and smiled to myself.

'Well, someone's happy,' said Felix in that arch way.

We enjoyed one another's vibrations in silence for a moment and went in to eat. The food was superb, our table talk was just right, the wine excellent, and the after-dinner coffee and Drambuie faultless.

'I didn't get any poppers,' Felix said.

We got into a cab and headed for a drugstore that will sell them without prescription, but a new man was on duty and he was too frightened to let us have them. Donald called a friend on the East side who was willing to give us six. We took another cab. They lived in a brutally ostentatious highrise with both a doorman and a deskman

in the lobby.

'They're a strange couple,' whispered Donald as we went up in the velour elevator. 'Charles, the older man, is a Wallace supporter. Can you believe it?'

'Well, being homosexual doesn't automatically make you a liberal, you know,' Felix said.

'Bitch,' Donald hissed.

'No reason why there shouldn't be gay fascists,' I said.

'But he's against homosexuality,' said Donald. 'I heard him say so. That's insane. He keeps at least two pretty boys as his lovers all the time.'

'America's a crazy country,' I said.

We got the poppers and went back to Felix's place. There was a solid air of expectancy. In the cab I found that I was squirming a little, rubbing my thighs together. How ugly we are when we become insistent about our pleasure. If we got it off, it would be very good. I had had better scenes with other couples, but never as thorough as with these two. I felt oddly cold-blooded.

At the apartment we wasted no time. Within five minutes we had opened the bed and drawn the curtains, taken off our clothes and lit a joint. We relaxed into the marijuana smoke and the warmth of one another's bodies, and a slow easy nodding and fondling began. I let myself slip down the length of Donald's body and in one movement took his half-erect cock into my mouth. Felix raked my torso with his teeth. We were rushing a bit and I wanted to slow the pace down, but Felix took to the heat. He grabbed me hard and pulled me towards him, crushing his mouth against mine. Donald moved down between my legs and prepared to fuck me. I snapped the ampoule of amyl nitrate and sank into that numbing whirring world of wracking sensation.

I moaned as the cock penetrated all the way into me and Felix punished me with his energy. He gnawed at my mouth while Donald began shuddering into my gluteal cunt.Coming so soon! In that strange slant of consciousness so often produced by that drug I sensed that the teeth which ravaged me were embedded in a skull and I flashed that my face was being drawn up into the face of death. As I let myself be sucked up I realised once more how much the ultimate experience of the sexual act is always, for me, the embrace of the grave.

It was a heavy revelation for so early in the orgy.

We fucked for about four hours altogether. During that time we stopped for tea, and once Felix took pictures of Donald and me in a delicate series of poses. In one of them I lay back in what felt like an attitude of abandon while Donald stood over me, six feet tall, long hair and moustache, handsome chiseled features. I was amazed at how cool and light we were with one another, and yet how physically fierce.

Back on the bed. 'Do what you did the other day/ I said to Felix. And he began to pull on his cock, letting the tip of it smash into my lips and onto my tongue. I inhaled more of the aphrodisiac and gummed my way into a soft spastic oblivion. But no matter how hard he tried, he couldn't get it off, and finally he subsided.