She'd
tried every way she could think of to make the characters in
her story sixty-nine each other in a pleasing way. To be erotic
in words, to be 69ing each other, face to crotch, crotch
to face and she would always get caught up in how unpleasant
it was to be on the bottom with a pair of balls dangling over
your forehead, or was it over your cheeks? She supposed it would
depend on the man and the length of his member or whatever
and that was how she'd always get caught up in the details and
lose track of her narrative or rather how the narrative would
get snagged round the pair of balls bouncing in her mind's eye
somewhere just above her right cheekbone and the smell of his
ass and she couldn't help remembering how she'd stopped herself
from laughing just before he, thank god, did manage to
make her come with his tongue that time at the party on the
floor beside her best friend's bed on the rough, red carpet
burning a place into her shoulder blades. Yes, she couldn't
help remembering how he'd smelled strange, really, not like
ass at all or like body odor or even like bad breath or like
anything she'd ever smelled on a body before but rather something
metal-like in the smell of his ass and in the hair around his
balls that distracted her so much she almost didn't come at
all but he was good enough to, what is it they're always saying
in erotica? To bring her off? Something like that. Anyway,
she wanted to write her own erotica, needed to, was desperate
to write her own erotica because she wanted to read what she'd
written in the hopes that it would help her come when she masturbated,
that she would be able to get herself off, which seemed
terrible and desperate, even to her, but everything she'd read,
had been reading, had spent her life reading--all the stacks
of books beside her bed that were now beginning to spill out
into the hallway--had become unfulfilling, had become uninteresting,
had become flat and about nothingness and about the fullness
of the fear of never coming and about the fullness of how desperate
she was for something new to be erotic in words, to get caught
up in a mouth on a body that wasn't necessarily hers but that
she could envision, or pretend to see, or almost pretend to
imagine or almost pretend to imagine feeling when her fingers
entered what she supposed was her own body, must be her body
opening to her fingers unless she'd lost her way and had been
what she wasn't sure.
And it was what she had always needed--the
inspiration, the watching of it, the seeing of the thing more
than an observer or even a companion as she'd discovered after
years of having sex with others and after years of having sex
alone and after years of feeling inadequate to every task and
after years of feeling like one of the crowd and pretending
to be excited and pretending to be a performer and pretending
to be a mass-market consumer and pretending to be a commodity
and pretending to oh yes baby I want you to come in my mouth,
I want you to fuck me harder with your huge cock pretending
after it all when she'd found out, to her deep despair and disappointment,
how anti-climatic it was, in spite of her climaxes, in spite
of her pleasure and his pleasure, or her pleasure and her pleasure,
or her pleasure and their pleasure and in spite of the sounds
and the tastes and the smells of the act itself how she was
always disappointed because there was no narrative quality to
the thing, no pacing that she could control, no development
that she could watch from a distance. And was that really the
thing, how involved she had to be when she was actually there
as opposed to just watching in her mind's eye the acts of others
but no, she was not a voyeur in the traditional sense
of the word at all, no, because she'd discovered through
much experimentation that she did not like to actually watch
real others doing it to each other either, see how he's eating
her out see how she's sucked him all the way back into her throat,
whatever no matter what it was, what variety of sex yes
it's really a German Shepard like all that Nancy Friday shit
with its weirdness exposed didn't titillate her but left
her cold and longing for what she'd always found the most fulfilling--just
words which she'd discovered was a thing alone and inside herself
and so impossible, so hard now that even these were going stale
only so many times to replay her favorite dirty scenes from
a thousand paperback novels and now she was beginning to discover
how slow and awkward her own imagination was, like when she
dreamed and couldn't get beyond the details of it, the door
that she forgot to close on her way inside the house just like
on all those sitcoms she watches when she's got nothing else
to do the way the details intrude and won't let go of the place
in her mind that snaps down and refuses to open.
But who could ever figure it out? He opened her cunt with
his fingers. He licked off her juice. He looked into her cunt
like it was a painting and why it couldn't work anymore,
all her favorite parts the way he used to watch her eyes move
from the sofa cushions to the tv and back again, how he watched
her all day and how her thoughts were increasingly drawn away
to the memories of the thing, her hips naked and lying on velvet,
her breasts squeezed roughly, I hurt please stop you always
bruise the inside of my thighs with your bones. How all
the parts of her body fell into a heap that she would watch
from a corner, like a mental patient but less dramatic than
that as she always told herself when she started to really wonder
if she should try something new, something really different
like remembering the inside of a dream she couldn't really see
but could only feel with the tips of her fingers as through
the thickest gloves rubbing lightly over the surface of a prickly
wave reaching to touch her face against the pillow, only feeling
itself with a sequestered part of the body winking slyly and
slipping past when she was turned to watch the others and their
shadows moving against the ceiling the way she first saw the
world in her mind slipping away from her, her fingers rubbing
the best parts of her own cunt that's the way yes just up
and down the sides slippery and not touching the clit just
like no one ever seemed to really get, you know, how the anticipation
was its own thing inside itself watching her watching from another
corner waiting to open and how he turned her on her side and
told her to relax. He turned her on her side and she stared
at the color of the wallpaper, its flowers opening and closing
while she watched the image of him entering her ass with first
his tongue yes how good that feels she heard herself
say and then his fingers uhhmm, yes more now and then
his dick all the way up her ass to the base of her spine splitting
open in a zippered thread unbuckling the length of the skin
and it's not that she'd loved and lost or anything so poetic
as that or that she had any illusions about how she said Stop.
I want you to come in my mouth. No, she was only too aware
of what had happened when own her fingers first wandered off
to the side of the lips of her cunt, just drifting down a slippery
ocean opening onto the universe and then falling forever, losing
her footing, getting lost inside her own mapped out wilderness
because she fell into sleep, into a paragraph so dog-eared her
mind rolled off it and yawned wide with naughty girl I must
spank you now! and she went under the lip of it, under the
knowing of how terrified she'd been for so long now knowing
it was almost over. He turned her to face him. He looked
into her eyes. He started to speak and she started to not listen.
The first time she'd had her pussy licked she was sure she'd
be in heaven forever, her best friend's pink bedspread moving
under her ass, the sound of the shower left on and draining
away to forever and she was sure she'd found a place to hang
onto, a place to surf a wave that wouldn't withdraw from her
lips but then the falling, the nothing, the coming into white,
into the curtains blowing through the living room the day
he turned her to face the front door and told her be very,
very still. Don't move, don't move and nothing will
hurt. I promise you won't feel a thing this time. For
a long time she'd thought she'd like the rape scenes best
where the woman was forced to do all the men in the group
and learned to love it, yes how she took one of them in
her mouth and one of them in her pussy and then, miraculously,
one of them up the ass and one of them between her boobs and
one of them in her face while all the rest of them
watched and waited their turns and how excited she was with
all their come dripping out of all her holes hours later,
spent queen of the orgy and when she was very little she'd
discovered the secret tent of the bedclothes tucked under
her butt and holding the book in place under there with the
yellow plastic flashlight and one free hand to do the rubbing,
yes the art of it all held in place in a cloth universe moving
down a dark river into a dream where she watched the letters
moving into words moving into the woman bending over the
bed as he took her from behind, an inch at a time, his huge
cock moving so slowly that she ground herself against him
and took him in up to his cods just like that time
he turned her hands on the wheel toward the road and told
her to try it for real this time, let's take it down the
street and into the parking lot of the K-Mart and then I'll
show you the view from the top of the world out there for
real and how pink the flutters around the edges while
the shower keeps running and I know what you and your friend
do when you have sleepovers and if I hold my hand over
your mouth like this no one will hear you when you come but
don't bite into my fingers doesn't it feel just that good
when you watch them through the wall? And no, she wanted
to tell him, not at all but then it was all over and time
to get back to supper and her mother's very own tuna casserole
with the green peas and carrots and a thousand words for orange
spinning through her fingers around the table and the too
real colors of the world turning grey inside her mind where
two people straddle each other all body parts badly lit in
a dingy bedroom and how to fit them together, the hardest
thing when you don't know your way through the forest of hair
and skin and angles bumping curves yielding and finding openings
inside and outside and then just watching the best parts of
her filled with things somewhere beyond her own ability to
feel them and how he turned her face toward the tv and told
her to just keep watching until she figured out how to do
it for herself and how it wasn't so hard really but
just a matter of finding a comfortable angle to go at it and
then the clock would strike and another day would close over
her effort to watch it and in her effort to write it against
a blue and white sheet tangled into the last afternoon she
could remember it being even close to as good a thing as had
ever happened and not just the clench of her teeth yearning
toward what she now knew could never belong to her because
he just kept turning her this way and that and telling her
to focus and to understand the science of it
and how she didn't really have to be anywhere she didn't want
to be for the rest of her life and wasn't that better anyway
than being a victim like all the rest of them and how they
could never really understand?
|