Zen and Sex (11 page)

“That and the
Kama Sutra
,” I joke.

“You’ve read the
Kama Sutra
?”

“No. I know what it is but I haven’t read it, cover to cover, no.”

“Do you know what it is?”

“It’s a sex manual…an old book all about sex positions. Right?”

“It’s an ancient Hindu text, maybe Sanskrit, which describes human love in very poetic terms. It does include sexual positions but it’s not really what one would call a manual or a how-to guide.”

“That saves me a trip to Wikipedia,” I instinctively joke but thank heavens, she lets it slide.

“We should go through it together. It’s pretty awesome.”

“I would like that.”

“How’s the cow?” Frances asks as I cut into my steak.

“Quit while you’re ahead, Frances. A lecture on vegetarianism and I’m dating cheerleaders.”

8. A Naked Person Can’t Tell Lies

 When we finally get to our destination, somewhere north of San Francisco in beautiful San Rafael county, it’s dark. I quickly get to meet Frances’ sister, Doris and her husband, Chuck. I didn’t want to ask but I think Doris is a few years younger than Frances, although Frances is so young looking, that I can’t be sure. Her sister and brother-in-law seem like a very weird couple to me and, even though they’re married, they don’t look like they are at all in love with each other. Pretty much like most married couples, I guess.

Frances did tell me a little bit about them on the way here and I did make a note to myself never to end up like them. For starters, Doris, because of some high-paying executive job in high-end retail consulting work or something is always out of town. What kind of marriage can you be having if one of you is always traveling, right? He’s a techie and works mostly at home, on the internet. I guess they Skype and phone each other to check in and see how their marriage is going from time to time.

And they do phone sex.

Which I can totally understand, considering how they are seldom together but please, phone sex? I tried it once but I just couldn’t get into it. The girl I was dating lived across town and one night I called her for a booty call. Except my car was in the shop and she refused to get into hers and drive over to my place. So she suggested phone sex. It was awful. After my initial question, ‘What are you wearing?’ I was out of titillating questions.

“What are you wearing?”

“Nothing.”

“You’re not wearing anything at all?”

“No.”

“Okay. Are you lying down?”

“Do you want me to be lying down?”

“It’s not a hypothetical question. I’m merely trying to picture where you are in your room, if you even are in your room, are you?”

“I’m lying down on the bed, wearing nothing. Naked.”

“Oh. Good. That’s better. That helps.”

“What would you like to do to me?”

“You know what I’d like to do to you.”

“Then say it. You need to tell me. Seduce me.”

“I’d like to come over and have sex with you.”

“That’s nice but it’s not very seductive. You need to be more, I don’t know, erotic.”

“Have you done this many times before? I get the impression that this is not your first time.” There’s no way I could have my first phone sex experience with someone who is so obviously an expert. It would be like playing tennis with someone ten times better than you where you’re running around the court like a madman trying just to get the ball over the net. Meanwhile, they casually stand in place, hitting the ball back with one hand and texting with the other. In one word: demoralizing.

“Is it your first time?” she asks, casually.

“Yeah. I pray to god they get my car fixed tomorrow.”

“So, what would you like to do to me?”

“I don’t know. What are you in the mood for?”

“I was in the mood for seduction but now I’m signing in to FaceBook.”

“Oh, okay. Call you tomorrow, then.”

That experience made me realize that you have to have a substantial and titillating vocabulary to master the whole phone sex thing or you will never get off the dime, or just get bogged down or worse still, become repetitive.

So Doris briefly shows Frances and me where to put our things and invites us to a home cooked supper where we all sit around the kitchen table and literally, have a feast.

“Where did you guys meet?” asks Doris.

“We met at Café Luna, my local hangout. Martin takes all his first dates there.”

“That was just…” I don’t get to finish.

“He struck out so many times I took pity on him.”

“How did you two meet?” I ask, hoping to deflect attention away from my dating fiascos.

“We met on an internet dating site,” answers Chuck, who immediately receives daggers eyes from Doris. “I’m not embarrassed,” he tells her.

“What’s to be embarrassed about?” asks Frances.

“It just seems so forced or desperate or something: ‘how did you meet your soul mate?  On GoGetASoulMateForYourself.com,’ It just sounds lame,” argues Doris.

“If you didn’t place a listing…we never would have met, sweetheart,” says Chuck.

“That’s just it. I’m with you because of that listing. But I can’t help thinking that maybe I’ve gone against fate,” says Doris.

I should add here that, although I haven’t personally witnessed a lot of drinking, it does appear that Doris has been imbibing for quite some time. This, I think, may explain her seemingly combatant mood, although maybe she’s always like this. I don’t know.

“In what way, gone against fate?” asks Frances.

“I don’t know, just books I’ve been reading lately suggest that fate will bring you your soul mate and you need to have trust and not force things or try to do it yourself…be open to the universe and somehow, in some unexpected way, perhaps, destiny will arrange for you to bring your soul mate to you.”

There’s a bit of a lull in the conversation here. I think what some people are thinking, I certainly am, is that what Doris is saying is that Chuck is not her soul mate and that, by co-opting the universe and fate and stuff, she messed up her chance for destiny to bring her true partner in life. I notice that no one is raising their eyes from their food, so as not to embarrass Chuck, any more than he is, I guess.

“But don’t you think that maybe you were
helping
destiny by placing that listing?” Frances says with impressive tact, “it’s a bit like the story of the guy that pleads to god to help him win the lottery and after many years of pleading, god finally tells the man that he can’t help him win the lottery if he doesn’t buy himself a lottery ticket.”

“Yeah, maybe,” says Doris, without any conviction, whatsoever. “I’m going to make some coffee: everyone for coffee?”

“Let me help,” says Frances and they both get up and leave me with a bereft-looking Chuck.

“How long have you guys been together?” I ask Chuck, who is now playing with the food on his plate.

“Three years,” answers Chuck, “but with Doris being away most of the time, it’s probably reduced to a few months.”

“Long distance relationships are tough. You two have stuck with it, though. That’s great,” I say, waffling.

“You’ve been in some long term relationships?”

“No. But everyone knows that they’re tough. They must be tough, not being together, in the same place, being apart…”

The dinner conversation never fully recovers, even after Doris breaks out some twelve-year-old Scotch to spice up the coffee. Chuck and Doris never say much for the rest of the evening but I can see that Frances is wired from the coffee and Scotch. Then she bores the pants off the married couple with her talk of Zen and the importance of honest communication.

 To be fair to her it is a really tough crowd. They both look massively depressed and I don’t even think that an impromptu visit from The Blue Man group, or something equally hilarious, would manage to cheer them up. Now,
that
is a couple in a funk.

Doris shows us to a guest bedroom which is not the one we initially put our overnight stuff in. “Tomorrow, when mum stays over, I’m going to shift you guys downstairs to the office, okay?”

When Doris leaves and closes the door, a cold chill goes up my back: Frances and I are going to sleep together. Hardly an unexpected turn of events, I did agree to come away with her for the weekend, after all. Yet strangely, now that we’re finally alone, I realize that, after our previous sexual encounter, I’m actually very scared to do anything at all sexual with her.

“Take off your clothes,” says Frances in a very sultry tone. I break out in a sweat and I think I might be shaking a little.

“Are you nervous?” Frances asks.

“Nervous about what?”

“I thought we were going to try honest communication?”

“I’m a little bit nervous, sure. The last time wasn’t great.”

“Would it help if I took off my clothes first?” Without waiting for an answer, Frances very slowly and very sexily undresses before me. Slowly unbuttoning her top, she looks at me the whole time: her breasts are full, surprisingly pert and overall, just amazing.

When she slowly and deliberately loosens her jeans belt, I feel like reaching out and stroking her boobs but I get the impression that she wants this to be a show. I don’t know if it’s intended but when she bends down to undo her shoes, she still doesn’t break her gaze staring at me and her head is now on the same level as my crotch, which is tease personified.

Off come her jeans and, “Hello,” she
totally
shops at Victoria’s Secret. Her pink undies with frills and bows that scream, ‘take me, I’m all yours!’ When she masterfully undoes her bra and smoothly drops it to the floor, I’m so relaxed and excited at the same time that now I can’t wait to join her nakedness and totally jump her bones.

I contemplate a slow, seductive striptease but I’ve tried it before and too many girls giggled for no apparent reason to make their reaction a one-off freak incident. I don’t want to rush it with Frances, though, so undressing, I split the difference between slow and manic.

We now stand facing each other, naked and ready to go but still I display remarkable restraint and hold back. Just like Humphrey Bogart in
The Petrified Forest
, I was going to underplay the whole scene, no grandstanding performance tonight, thank you very much.

“Now you can’t lie,” Frances says. “A naked person can’t tell lies.”

“When was the last time you had sex?” I ask, coyly taking advantage of the naked-no-lying strategy. Frances simply smiles and walks closer until she is inches away. I take this as my cue to kiss her but she stops my lips with her finger.

“What do you say we let our bodies get to know each other first?”

Very gently she takes my right hand and strokes it so softly that the hairs stand erect on every other part of my body. As her fingertips slowly moves up my arms, I feel like I’m just about to burst: this woman is a total turn-on machine.

“Put your mind into the tips of your fingers and touch everything, except the obvious,” Frances says with a breathy sexiness, even though I don’t think she was trying to be sexy.

So, like her, I start with her hands and stroke her arms and shoulders. Her skin is so soft and silky, she feels like a porcelain doll. I’ve no idea why all of this is so gorgeously erotic but it is: I haven’t even started on her breasts yet. As she strokes my bare chest with her delicate fingers, I’m almost shaking with desire.

“Frances?”

“Yes, Martin?”

She moves her lips just centimeters from my lips and strokes her nose softly against mine. Is that what they call an Eskimo kiss? I can feel my lower lip quivering.

“Are we going to have sex soon?”

“What do you think this is?”

“I don’t know. Eskimo sex?”

“You want to fuck, is that it?”

I know she didn’t intend the word ‘fuck’ to be exponentially, mind-blowing erotic but I’m hanging by a thread here.

“It would be good to know if that’s where you intend this to end up, that’s all.”

“In Zen archery, the archer doesn’t concern himself solely with the target. If he merges his mind with the bow, the arrow and the target, then it becomes one movement. The archer doesn’t fire the arrow; the arrow shoots itself.”

“That really clears things up, thank you.”

“It means not to be so goal oriented.” Frances is now lightly kissing my shoulders and neck. If we don’t get horizontal soon, premature ejaculation is definitely in my future.

“It’s the journey and not the destination.”

“You do know Zen.”

“I watch PBS when the porno channel gets blocked,” I say, trying not to think of any porno whatsoever.

“Does this excite you?”

“The finger teasing or the running commentary?”

“Did you know that words turn women on?”

“Which is ironic: words put men to sleep.”

“Then why do you have an erection?”

“The arrow has been ready to release since your bra came off.”

Frances’ fingers finally get introduced to my obvious parts and we finally do get horizontal and the arrow does get to fire, twice.

It was so unbelievably am-az-ing that I don’t think I’ll ever recover. Just as baby ducklings become imprinted by the first thing they see moving before them, I believe that sexually, I have just imprinted upon Frances. I will never make love to another woman ever again. I could but my psyche just might not be able to handle the subsequent disappointment and regret. I think I love this Zen thing. For my future survival and as a matter of maintaining my sanity, I must keep Frances…at all costs.

9. Do I Look Old And Haggard In The Morning, Sweetheart?

I wake early. Actually I have no idea if it’s early or not, Frances is asleep beside me and it just feels early. Even if I didn’t get a full eight hours sleep, I feel alive, awake and enthusiastic. Normally when I wake up before the woman I’ve just slept with, I’ll accidently on purpose wake her up so that we can have coffee and breakfast. Or if I want to be alone, I’ll sneak out of bed, get dressed, make breakfast for two and hope that after she eats, she’ll toddle off home. But not this time.