Saline Solution (5 page)

Bertha looked at him. 'What kind of bird was it?'

A look of perplexity crossed his face, giving him a glazed expression. 'I don't think that's a relevant aspect of the story,' I said.

'Oh,' she exclaimed, 'but I want to
picture
the bird. And Francis describes things so well. What did the bird look like, Francis?' she keened.

He shook his head. The blade was in his belly. 'Uh, it was kind of a small brown bird/ he said, and looked to me for support. But I was not in the mood to help him humour Bertha's hurt. Especially when she expressed her pain as hostility. Lucinda and I went into the bedroom to fuck.

We got undressed rapidly and I lay down on my back. She got on top and lowered her cunt onto my erection. She was very wet and hot. The wild mood changes of the day had turned her on. She swallowed my cock whole, and began to rock her pelvis back and forth, using my pubic bone as a fulcrum. She moved back and up, and then forward and down so that I felt like she was sucking at me with her cunt. I slapped her arse, lightly at first, and then harder, between the cheeks and over her arsehole and cunt. At one point I hit my balls with the tip of my finger and felt a crazy jagged pain shoot through me. I felt an anger that was not directed at any particular person, and I shouted out again and again as she continued to fuck me. Her face was calm, impassive. Her breasts were gloating and bouncing off her chest like water balloons, and only the contractions in her belly showed that she came again and again and again, before I turned my face to one side and let myself shoot off into her.

I felt, immediately afterwards, as I used to feel as a child when I had finished masturbating and believed that I had committed a mortal sin. Even fucking had become corrupted. The timbre of the time had changed. I realised that I was becoming hard, and even when I thought of social change, my mind went immediately to dynamite. But I was frightened by my own violence, and by the violence which would be unleashed in the society if I were so to act. Time, chronological time, moves through me no matter what I do. I am a thing of duration. Within my allotted space, the options are open. Do I wish to commit murder? Do I wish to man the barricades? The opportunity for any form of intensity of theatre I desire is available. And survival comes only through a miracle.

We got dressed and went back into the living room. We didn't look into one another's eyes at all. Donna was there, dressed in black leather pants and suede shirt, with a thick red leather belt and long violet cape. She was six feet tall.

'Anybody want to go bicycle riding with me?' she said.

Francis shot her a surreptitious glance and then looked over at Bertha, whose frozen smile could not mask the gleam of animal cunning in her eyes as she studied the outrageously electric woman who stood in the middle of the floor, lacking only a whip to complete her role. His defeat was small but exquisite. He looked down into his lap and pretended he hadn't even heard the question.

'I'll go,' Lucinda said.

She needed to let the open air absorb some of the energy flooding her. The fuck had satisfied one hunger, but aroused another. I wished she could get Donna to bed and let me participate, or at least watch. Another body in bed would not solve any problems, but would certainly contain them for pleasant periods of time. I was ready for escape, even the obvious, the trite.

The two women left, and Francis leaned back in his chair, his eyes closed. Bertha looked around for someone to hate. 'We're robots,' I said, 'Press the buttons and we react. We've all been programmed for opacity from birth.'

I went out to the porch and smoked one cigarette after another. Despite all the literature and propaganda, despite my own training to the contrary, sex was not for me a matter of personality. When I'm looking down at a moaning, churning arse, and I am loving each moment of strange glorious contact with the human being who sports that arse, and I am cock-happy with the wonder of our dance, I really don't care what the other person's name is. I don't even care what my own name is. Ecstasy has no name.

'You woman, whoever you are, the idiosyncrasies of your life story are something I will be pleased to share when our heads are on the pillow. For the moment of time I share geographic space with you, I will respect your uniqueness, and be alert to not making life any more difficult for you or me than it need be. But when we fuck, you are all women to me. You are every black and yellow and red and white and tall and short and thin and fat and old and young and frightened and fearsome and mother and daughter and rapture and terror that is you, woman. And if in the midst of our transport, one of your bodies is moved away and another put in its place, do you think I am going to stop to notice the difference, except in the ways I must change to relate to the new you most fully?

'And you, man do you imagine when I am down, I mean way down, I mean all the way down, on your cock, it matters to whom that cock is attached, except in the degree of sensitivity that you show in relation to our intimate communion and communication?

'A tongue is a tongue is a tongue is a tongue. The language it speaks when it does not serve as a handmaid to the word is what translates my soul. The problem of relationship ceases to be a problem when personality becomes the crucible in which being refines its awareness. Sex reaches its fullest expression when it strikes like lightning to suffuse the space with silence.'

I thought, and got up to make myself a cup of coffee, and drank it very slowly while I smoked three more Gauloises. 'It's time to give up smoking soon,' I said to myself.

Francis and Bertha walked past me, self-consciously aware that I knew that they had healed the rift and were going upstairs to fuck. 'How tedious we all are,' I thought.

'I wonder how I feel right now?' I said out loud.

I felt like a dirty dishrag thrown into the greasepit under a sink. 'I've felt better,' I thought, 'and I've felt worse.'

I imagined that things, then, were pretty good, or not too bad. There was no way to know for sure.

IV

Perhaps we have entered a period of annihilation politics. The only true revolutionary is the one who affects a life style which takes the imminent destruction of the entire species as a basic premise. We who have awakened from the mist of anomalous obscurity which hypnotises the mass of manwomankind form the true danger to those who require the maintenance of social systems to sustain their power. But the rulers are safe, for the people are conditioned to follow, and only the brutal presume to rule.

By all my principles, the foetus which now grew in Lucinda's womb had a complete right to life. I held no grudge against the thing, and in a general way, I wished it well. But if its birth were to serve to crystallize Lucinda's emotional dependence on me, then it could not be allowed to join us. And she did not want to be tied to the process of raising a child without my support and help.

'Night after night in that apartment with a baby! I'm already isolated to the point of going crazy. That would kill me,' she said.

For my part, I wanted no long term marriage with her. That hadn't been my intention when we moved in together.

The child was a mockery of our purpose. But its existence raised a serious question. If it were my life against its, I would not have hesitated for a second to dispatch it. But it was my
life style
against its
life.
Was
how
I lived more important than
that
it lived? Did it point to some essential defect within my person that I could not allow this infant to come into the world and maintain myself as well?

All my Catholic conditioning rose up to join a febrile imagination to see the foetus in its human development. I could not think about it without picturing it, in anatomic detail, in spiritual context.

There were never these problems in the Japanese whorehouses. Walking into a room with twenty or thirty women, young and soft, with such sweet stoppered eyes made of almonds. Music and sequined gowns, the smells of perfume and incense, and everywhere the glowing flesh, the golden flesh moving thigh against thigh, breast against bra cup, buttock against buttock. The mouths that watched and the hands that told.

The simple availability of the women was breathtaking. An introduction, fifteen or twenty minutes of pleasant conversation, and a brief exchange of money, made the prelude to a long evening of bathing and tea and sweetcakes, many hours of delicious oriental fucking, exquisite and internal. The tender wrinklings of their nipples and the cupped shudders of their cunts would ride you for hours into the most delicate bliss.

The choice of the evening could be a specialist in oral sex, and would suck and nibble your cock for what seemed an eternity or two. She seemed to have an instinct for the closeness of ejaculation, and could bring you to tears by licking the tip of your cock until you were sure you would come, had to come - and then she would let it go. The sperm subsided still bubbling down the centre of your cock, and you tingled in absolute pleasure for five or ten minutes. And then she would begin again, different, more. And when you came, it did subsume all the near orgasms before it. It actually was like a flow of molten lava exploding from your cock. And she drank it in wildly, joyfully. It was what she had been preparing for so long, like a master cook delicately testing the fragility of a pie crust as it bakes. And you realised that she liked doing this, she thrived on it. And you wondered how you would ever again be able to come inside a woman who was less than utterly enthusiastic.

Or you might take home a yellow version of the girl next door, and when you took her to bed find out that she was a crazy who wanted to lick the shit off your arsehole, and bit you so hard on the chest that the skin broke and blood flowed, and you hit her four or five times to make her puff off into some private ecstasy and let you do whatever you wanted with her body. And. you played out every picture of degradation you had ever fantasised.

Or you might fall in love.

'Yoshie?'

The thin girl turned lazily in her half-sleep, her eyes still closed, the dim light making her skin seem like stone, her face relaxed like that of a great bronze Buddha.

'Hai. Nani?' she said.

'I want you.' 'Oh.'

It came out as a moaned whisper. You touched her. There was a long still moment, and she was suddenly upon you, as quickly as the movement of a striking snake. Always like that with her. She was always ready, always attentive. She cared for you the way a tree produces fruit, without thought, without consideration.

And so you married her, and when you got back to the United States, suddenly everything was ugly again. You were ugly, she was ugly, life was a constant intimidation, and in confused frustration you walked out one afternoon, and she spent nine years recovering before she could let another man into her heart, and you still wonder whether you will ever know another woman like that. Was she the fabled only-one that is supposedly allotted to each of us?

Captivated by the convolutions of the contest, I forgot to notice the nature of the arena. With deadening regularity I mistook the drama for the dharma. As Francis put it, 'Everyone's begun to confuse the collective subjective with the objective.'

The next afternoon was timeless. The sun spoke geometrically from the sky and the earth felt cosy. There was no hint of the endless blackness of space or the vastnesses through which our planet plummets in its chaotic whirlings. I sat alone in the living room, watching the light contour the space into segments. The forty-year-old Seaview houses stood like hunchbacked rocks. And from one long wall of windows, I could see the dunes which led to the water.

Lucinda had gone to visit her two daughters again who were just returning from camp. Her marriage had been prototypic. She was the debutante daughter of a wealthy lawyer and his dog-show addict of a wife. Her husband was the very successful, very bored, Long Island Jewish doctor. She played the scene for fourteen years, with the proper costumes, the proper lines, and the proper number of lovers. And one morning woke up to find that she was suffocating and had been dying of dryness for a long time.

After a reflex consideration of what she supposed was her duty, she realised that she had absolutely no feeling at all for her husband, and only a detached interest in the future development of her children. 'I knew that if they stayed with him they would at least get the best in food, clothing, and shelter, go to good schools and all that shit. And I had nothing to offer them but inarticulate disillusionment.' Such was her reasoning.

She left that day. And when all the shock had subsided and the legalities were arranged, she opted for a cash settlement and left him with a house, the cars, the daughters, the social matrix of his days, and a new girlfriend whom he soon married. She spent a year doing nothing, becoming promiscuous with men who would call her at three in the morning because they felt like fucking and knew she was available. Then she met me. And got pregnant again. ('The diaphragm must have slipped' -laughter.)

During the first few weeks when we were telling one another enough of our life stories to provide at least an outline, I met her parents. They had long ago reached that state, so common, where marriage is a wearying, but necessary, truce. Her father had relinquished all power in the pleasantly baroque West Side suite they lived in, and in the Berkshire estate, and in the matter of such choices as to which countries to visit on this year's European trip. He devoted himself to the intricacies of corporate law and the vagaries of the stock market, and counted himself blessed on those days when his lower back didn't pain him too much.