respite

moving and won't be on until monday.
consider this a promise borken.
every promise eventually is.
but the promise to have something up by monday evening, that's a new promise.
i'll keep it. you'll see.

S

A Portuguese woman who worked in finance for the UN. We were foreigners in a Mediterranean country but she wasn’t nearly as foreign as I was.

Our meeting was simple: she walked alone into a pub where I was sitting with friends, looked around, looked at me in particular, begin to walk out, then looked at me again.

She acted surprised when I caught her up on the street and maybe she was surprised; maybe she’d not meant to invite all this. When we fucked, she spoke to me in Portuguese, but this is not what makes it memorable.

A week or two later, she asked me to her hotel and because on each of the nights I’d gone drinking with her and her friends, I’d recieved what seemed mixed signals, I wasn’t sure what she wanted with me there, in the middle of the day, a sudden and under-explained call.

Her face was rather round and she wore her hair in a pageboy cut, a dark eyed girl with a wide smile and large teeth that made it look when she smiled sort of dangerous, like a woman who could devour.

She was in a sundress and the room was very small.

When she sat on the bed and folded her legs, I saw she had on no panties and it wasn’t so much that unexpected flash of pubic flesh and hair that excited me as it was the idea that she had to know I’d seen what was supposed to be secret and yet she was nonplussed by that knowledge.

It was enough to make me feel invited.

I’d never seen so much hair on an x or around it; a dark line grew up from it to her belly button and when I traced it with my eyes, a fear passed over me that it would stop me dead.

In fact, it didn’t. In fact, with this girl I could not stop fucking, though I tried three or maybe four times.

She’d talked in the past about an ex lover, a man from Finland to whom she’d been engaged, I think. We’d meet for drinks and get to kissing but he was always on her mind. That was a love that had gone wrong and now she regretted it, and I remember thinking from the way she talked about him that I hoped some of my ex lovers would talk about me in the same way.

Now we were fucking and what she liked was to kneel on the bed so she could watch in the closet mirror as I fucked her from behind. There a thickness to her flesh, a sort of firmness, as well, so that you understood her nude as a woman of bodily strength you would not recognize in the clothed world.

We’d gone on for awhile and I’d not come but I’d realized it was time to stop though there was no real reason for stopping, so that I felt gradually strange in the small hotel in the broad daylight with this girl from Portugal with that line of hair on her belly, this girl who still was in love with another man and fucking me for who knows what reason.

She put back on her dress and I put back on my pants. Then she stood for some reason above me on the bed and as I embraced her I thought again of her crossing her legs and I saw her x all over again, and I remembered her bare ass and the small of her back and the muscles on the back of her neck that strained as she watched herself and me and the mirror and how they strained more when she would turn to meet my eyes or kiss; and so my hand went up her thigh, hypnotized, maybe, by the remarkable availability of this x, and soon my fingers were inside of her and I was sweeping her down because I had to fuck again, a if to settle it this time once and for all.

The second time and at least one more we got to the point of dressing before falling back to the fucking, like a record that hits a point of skip and leaps back and plays over again and seems ready this time to go to the end but never quite gets over the scratch.

We went on in this cycle for several hours and finally as she lie there this time in her dress I felt that I was coming though it was never my intention with her to come. Though in fact we’d agreed that I would not come.

I closed my eyes and I blackened my mind and I tried to shut down my body as I pulled out.

She asked me if I’d come and I said and believed I’d not, and then I opened my eyes and we looked together at the smallest pearl of a drop on the head of my x, this bubble of potential life that had escaped.

I hadn’t lied, but I felt like a liar.

I didn’t know what to say and so I asked her if this is why she’d invited me. She didn’t say anything, but she smiled, the same way she’d done in the pub when I might not have followed her.

A woman in her clothes who passes by you. You think you want to know them all, all their secrets, to prove to yourself that there really is an x beneath all that cloth, tongue in her mouth, lust in her heart, as if there is something about you that places you amongst the very few deserving people who will know her in these ways.

These clothed girls. These two worlds. In one of them, the women pass dressed and nobody really thinks they fuck anybody. In the other, you see them bare and you know them for their wants.

You think you want to be close to each of them that touches anything in you.

Maybe it’s not just that you imagine this need; maybe you really do have it, and maybe it is legitimate in its way.

Several years later and you ask yourself how you feel about this one, for example. As if it can be some kind of gauge for the others; as if you can know whether you should have or should not have, the many by the one.

Several years later, you blog her, you blog the others, and with most of them by the time you’re done writing, you’re hard against the memory, and you’ll come to the thought of her at least one more time.

That uncrossing of her legs and the exposure of her x in that sundress; that mysterious and alarming line of hair to her belly button; these things you’ll never lose, and the point of having them you don’t know but you’re glad to have them just the same, and that’s all really there is to say about it, or any memory.

Interlude

What I am talking about is last night, and this is not an x post, she either has been blogged like that already or she will be blogged like that but this I mean in a different way.

She is my apartment and her live in boyfriend is wherever he is.

She’s trying to teach him that she’s leaving and he’s trying to hold on to her and so he tells her that he’ll do anything for her; everything he says boils down to need. He promises to morph, to reinvent, to do anything. He bares himself past the point of his true vulnerability.

His heart, he always says, feels to miss beats and his headaches are getting bad and seriously, seriousfuckingly, he thinks the stress of all of this may be killing him.

These thoughts he punctuates with bouts of pouting and bouts of screaming accusation, but everything ends up in apology and please.

She spends time with me to stay away from him. She tells herself what she wants is me but the truth is what she wants is anybody not him; what she wants is to not be alone in the vacuum of one you want to be away from but are habituated to, the way the prisoner misses his cell.

So we’ve spent the day together and part of the evening and I’m ready for her to go but she has not gone. She sits on the couch and watches while I do my situps.

Her phone rings. I come up, hold, lower, do it again. She answers. I come up, hold, lower, do it again.

We are in the same room but we are far apart; this world of exercise is solitary and I don’t resent her presence in it in this moment but I wouldn’t want to do it again tomorrow.

Tomorrow, I want to do my situps, and maybe everything else, alone.

I know by now I can’t be her full on transition strategy. How I came to this conclusion I’m not sure or at least am too tired to articulate, but though once I could imagine a future with her now I cannot.

I come up, hold, lower, do it again.

Her voice, it’s far away. Her conversation, I don’t mean to hear it. I love the feeling of a situp, that old habit, the way you feel every muscle, one build on top of the other clicking you into place, then the uncoiling, and you are flat and the pain you’ll get to is semi-sweet.

I’ve met the boy, good looking and trying to sell himself as the strong silent type, and I thought about all the secrets I know of him, the way she has made him transparent, that type of pathos.

He sips his drink and eyes me but I can hear him begging her. He smiles smugly when we shake hands goodbye, but I can see the way his face distorts when he wants her to think he is in pain.

Boys always want to hang on. For him, for most of them, for most of us, it’s about possession. By nature we don’t like to give up what we hold, even if we don’t demonstrate a feeling of value for it.

But I’m not willing—I don’t think I’m willing, anyway—to possess this girl. Let’s say I’m ninety percent sure that we are eighty percent of the way through this thing, which is to say there is much more behind than in front, which is to say we’ve entered the last act.

I come up, hold, go down.

I hear her say, Oh my god…what emergency room?

And she clicks the phone dead and she looks at me and she says, J was struck by lightening.

The first thing I wonder is how he arranged it, this act of God we compare things to when we want to suggest how rare they are

I know what he’s doing even as the doctors examine him. He is thinking about the way to play this, how to point out in almost subtle ways that it’s her fault he was where he was and when; how to demonstrate that he is bitter toward her for what she’s recently done but that he still loves her though honestly he should not, how to suggest that he is ready to forgive, if she can demonstrate her allegiance to him, especially in this time of recovery.

In his minds eyes, he practices a wince so that he might demonstrate to her a physical pain he doesn’t really feel but pretends to want to hide.

How to scare her with the specter of his near real death.

And I know what she’ll be doing for some time. She’ll be taking care of him.

She’s gone and really that’s what I wanted of her but now that it seems I’ve lost her I began to reconsider.

I come up, hold, lower.

I think: Struck by lighting.
I think: I can’t compete with that.

J

Another girl with a boy who couldn’t imagine his girl like this, and it is this failure of his knowledge of her that forces the space from which she begins to look for one like me.

Once, you can imagine it, they fucked as deeply as she and I ever will, and that moment has gone, but he doesn’t know it because boys are always slow to release. Slow to realize. Slow.

And me, I bring her, if you can consider her brought, into a complicatedly crowded situation already.

How I love options but hate making choices.

An East-Asian girl with my her black hair sleek and her lips perfect pouts and a sort of myster to the eyes she occasionally lets you study.

She remained nearly still beneath me in this not slow fucking, and she focused on my shoulder, on my arm, on my belly, on my chest, and her eyes would move very slightly over the area at which she stared, like an artist trying to remember something she’d want to recreate later, or an assassin looking for a point of entry.

Finally her hand would move up and she’d touch to the point of her gaze lightly at first, the way we touch things of which we want to be sure, and then less tentatively, with a grip that meant to thoroughly know what it held, and then her hand would fall away and she would move her eyes to some other part of me and start again.

I realized: she was eroticizing me.

She was turning me into photographs, pornography: this is the man that fucks me and this realization made me want to thank her, the way I felt about r early on when she’d come to watch me play football and sit rapt throughout it and tell me afterwards, it was beautiful, you moved like a lion…opposite of the way I felt about my first wife when she was bored with my little boy games and couldn’t see me for having seen me so much.

We all want to be admired. We all want to be adored. And whatever it is they admire and adore you for the most, you start to hunger for something other. If they seem to love you for your body you beg attention for you mind. If they seem to love your thinking you want them to want you for your dancing.

Eventually she raised her head toward my arm, slowly like one who is hypnotized, like one caught up in the inevitable, and I saw that she meant to kiss a standing vein just below my shoulder, and the way she did it with her perfect lips parting perfectly and then freezing there in a kiss that held like a photo made me want to forsake everything.

Made me want to feel her bite and burst the vein.

Our fist kiss was in the wind of a passing train outside a city bar stuck in the country where because we were some kind of novelty everything for us was free and we sat on a couch in the pulsing music and the pulsing light and she would not look at me for long periods of time and then look at me hard and so finally I had written on her hand: I want you and she’d nodded and ten minutes later written on mine can we go and outside we’d embraced, our first real touch, and if in this blog you want a movie moment, perhaps that is it, J in her pink dress moving into my arms and the train flashing by with all its noise and suction and her hair whipping and her mouth, that perfect mouth, opening.

And now she studies me the way I study women sometimes not for fault or lack of fault, not because I want to find the weak point on which later I might obsess, but because I am astounded by the idea of our contact, of her contact with any person, that something so seemingly magic, unworldly, can be touched by one like me.

And you wonder: does she lift me up or do I pull her down?

As if this is a collision between an angel and man as opposed to a collision between two humans simply. The way we try to spool art into our fuckings. Or the way we simply see it there.

Sometimes, rarely, with a woman you may become sharply aware that she is a full other being, complete as you are, absolutely whole, that she thinks and feels as many thoughts and emotions as you feel, and as deeply, and when this happens, when the weight of not just her body and words but the full of her strikes me, I slip toward her, almost as if a transference of consciousness is taking place, and in it, I lose the world a little.

We fuck and I am her and maybe she’s even me.

She’s had one lover but she’s had him well, or her instincts are pure, because she touches with fingertips and the tip of her nose and even her eyelashes not in the way of most women that is like an experiment in touch quickly performed and then abandoned, but with the patience of one who thinks she is practicing art and has the confidence that even though the flesh of the touched is still, it loves this attention.

She will lie for a long time with her legs apart and her knees raised and her two fingers opening her x because she knows precisely where she should be kissed and she wants you to know it also.

And on this night and others there is never enough, you cannot leave this table full, but you will leave this table. You’ve crashed against the limits of sex, and it should remind you of the Buddhist lesson, to live in the moment, your hovering there like a yo-yo at the end of it string, the place a genius in his fit of epilepsy hovers quivering and momentarily enlightened before coming back to the world, and you tell yourself: be here and now.

And afterwards, you tell yourself: I was there.

The memory you know you are creating when you fuck properly.

If you are addicted to anything, this is it.

k

Blond and blue eyes and petite and big breasted like a perfect little party girl, only now she’s twenty eight and her marriage has become separation and that separation leans toward divorce and she is looking hard for something to cling to.

In fact, so am I.

This is a period of sickness, pneumonia, and I am thirty something but I know now that some day I will die, and I know that my body will betray me in other ways, so that I will live as my father and other older men I know live, off of prescriptions and doctor visits and with caution.

So sickness keeps me calm and she lies often enough beside me and when I wake I imagine and fear that she has studied me when I slept and who knows what awful thing she’s see then?

It is a game we play; I try not to drift off before she does and sometimes I win, and then I study her and see her with her face slack and her mouth slightly open. There are angles from which she isn’t beautiful to me but she is the kind of girl a man likes to take with him walking on a crowded beach or into a bar where all his friends and maybe even some of his exes hang out.

Though basically, we’re housebound.

Sometimes I walk her out to her car and it is her face and especially her eyes in the sunlight of the winter of my sickness that offers up the greatest illusion of possibility.

As it begins with k, I face a pregnancy scare with a girl already blogged; she calls me on Christmas Eve and tells me the two pink lines are on the stick, do I know what they mean? I’m coughing, convalescing, recently diagnosed and very much alone and very far away. She hasn’t got the box and so I call everybody I can think of, including my mother, and nobody can tell me what two pink lines mean. The next day, Christmas, I drag myself around the city in which sickness has gotten me stuck and try to find an open shop. Finally, a grocery store, and they have the tests, and I read the box, and it is simple: she is pregnant.

A week later, her doctor tells her she’s not. Or maybe she made it all up, there was no stick, no missing box, no doctor. I don’t know and won’t ever.

But in that week, what I think about, it’s k; what I think is that she and I will marry and raise the baby that I’ve made by accident some night two months ago with this other woman.

K and I, we don’t even fuck. Aside from the first night of my return, when she pushes herself on top of me and says, Should we? she is self conscious enough to know she is underprepared for that kind of penetration. And me, I’ve fucked too much in this sickness without knowing it was serious and now I know.

More than anything, I want to rest beside her.

Of course, one thing leads to another. You intertwine your little fingers. Then your legs. She kisses your forehead, you her cheek, she your mouth. These are tongues acting tentative. Like they are saying goodbye more than hello. But that is your hand on her tiny belly, you fingers in her thin hair.

It always ends the same way. I’m on all fours leaning down across her torso and one pair or another of gym pants is always pushed halfway down her legs and her panties have followed them and I’m licking a very small and wet and completely shaven x, slowly, and she has her hands on my shoulders and eventually she is saying, We’d better stop.

A man, or at least this one, never knows how he feels about a woman until after he’s fucked her. The mind clears and the eyes open. I try at this stage to never sleep with a woman with whom I don’t have some sense of serious potential, not that that potential is even close to a guarantee.

And there’s a window, it’s open I don’t know how long, but what you find is that perhaps it is possible to crawl through it to soon, but most certainly it is possible to not crawl through it in time. All this sleeping, all this licking, no fucking, afternoons with dvd’s, light dinners in the evening, always lying there in bed together, touching her x, rubbing her temples, and the window closes. One day you wake up in the late afternoon with the dvd you were watching with her still playing and her blond hair splayed on the pillow and her eyes closed and the lashes clumped with mascara and you look at her hard and you know its over, that you cannot at this point even try to recreate the potential.

The spark of it has burned out for lack of serious blowing.

You tell her to return to her husband and you mean it. You tell her that the hump that comes up in every relationship is the hump people bring with them. They think to solve it by starting over but what they find is that as the relationship with the new person progresses, there again is the hump.

And what you do then is you start over.

So that you will live always on beginnings and never know a decent middle or end.

You tell her: this is no way to go about it.

Solve the problem in this relationship. Someday, anyway, you’ll have to solve it. Your hump. Why not now, with him? And him, the hump he carries, let him work it out now, with you.

I want to get better and so I stay still long after she is gone, days and weeks, even.

Later, she’s calling a lot, and you think sometimes to go back for the fuck, but you know that’s all you’d be going back for, another fuck, as if they can be stacked up together and get you to some high place.

Age, better sense, fatigue, empathy, something like any or all of those things tell you better.

D and r

Something brings her to the building where I do my work. Something puts her in a room across the hallway from my office.

Call it coincidence.

When I pass the open doorway I give a sweeping glance to the twenty or so people seated inside, and my eyes stop on her:

An interesting face, the blond hair short and pulled back and the blue eyes standing out and the crooked smile that suggests that more often than not, whatever she is thinking she won’t tell you.

The kind of face that stops you at a party. Or in the hallway. Staring in like a incompetent spy, thinking as you know better than to think but sometimes cannot help thinking anyway that if only you could have and know this girl, you’d be satisfied.

Sometimes you know that you will someday funnel through the clouds and step into the blue, just you and a woman, and that there you will create with her a world nobody else will really access. This is what you tell yourself sometimes, anyway, especially when you are tired, or just when you are calm.

Call this a sort of prayer.

I return to my office and I almost lose the thought of her to my work.

Eventually, she comes to stand in the doorway. You might want to call this serendipity.

She says nothing and I wait for her to speak. She looks too together to be the kind of woman that would reply to a gaze by confronting the gazer, or maybe it is that that is precisely what a woman as together as she looks would do.

Then I realize, she doesn’t need to announce herself or her intention: I know who she is already.
I say her name, first and last, the way you say the name of somebody you want to prove you have not forgotten.

I say, What was it, two years ago?

And she says, No, just last year.

Indeed, just last year.

We met a bar. She was with a friend and for much of the night she hid behind a front of bemusement, the way we like to seem as if we are just watching things unfold instead of participating in them, as if this faux witness status will keep us safe.

She would only take my number but I felt sure she’d call. Our conversation was both airy and intelligent, and we'd played well off of each other, the way sometimes strangers can dance together one song and because of accidental shared rhythm seem not strangers when the song is over.

She didn’t call.

Then she was in the grocery store a week later, standing in line with a green basket in her arms, and I was able to walk behind her and look at her the way we look at people we want to appraise when they don’t know we’re appraising them, and the cut of her waist, the round of her ass, the bare of her shoulder, all these things made me wish she’d called.

We can call this coincidence too, this meeting in the supermarket a little over a year ago.

She seemed happy to see me and she laughed openly as we talked and she did not explain her not calling but she simply gave me her number.

Several nights later, we had dinner, drinks. I was at a point of stumbling out of the sleepwalk that follows a bad break up; it was like waking from a fever, that morning of transition between sickness and health, and I was telling myself not just to find lovers, but to find the Woman.

We leaned against the car and for the first time kissed and she moaned softly as if she had a hidden hunger and I realized that for all her fronts there was to her a physical and emotional loneliness and that because she made her choices carefully she had not been touched properly for some long time.

Her apartment was like the kind they use to show prospective renters; nothing was out of place; it was as if nobody real lived there, the furniture, the paintings, that was all. Her room was more personal and there she changed into workout shorts and a t-shirt and how I admired her while she changed, not just the shape of her body, but that there was no show of false modesty: she simply turned her back, took off her blouse, her jeans, her bra, and stood there for a moment bare like that.

We fell to kissing and I re-undressed her and she opened my jeans.

I lay on her bed with my head almost off and she stood with her x over my face so I could kiss it, a pretty x bright pink just inside. She leaned forward and I felt that we were moving toward full surrender. Her hair was on my x, then her face, her mouth; I could hear her kiss but I couldn’t tell her lips from her hair and know exactly how or where she worked against me.

Then she was up again, unsurrendered.

We were moving too fast, even I knew that.

I had recently been talking with another girl, r, and we had a date planned for the next night. We’d meet at her house in the country and everything would move so quickly there, to such a level of intimacy and involvement, that my focus was not just cut in half but taken fully away, so that within twenty four hours, D was blurred for me and our night together was undercut.

When she called to ask to see me again, I simply didn’t call back.

I began drinking vodka tonics on the porch of r's country house and thinking that maybe, if I drank enough of them, I could go on with her forever. A half Cuban girl, like all the women here, a girl from wealth who held herself with poise, this girl, her perfect face, her tape worm heart, the way she'd suck my x until I came and whisper to me afterwards that it was a fun way to show her care, the way we'd fuck and stop fucking and start again, passing nights and sometimes days, the way her physical hunger was so bare, her face in the night coming toward me, her slightly open mouth on my neck, my belly, my x; I remember her shaven x and the first time I touched it and the last and the ass not properly shaped but how when I would fuck her from behind it was the small of the back I loved, her tan skin taut, and what I remember best is holding her face in my hands while she lay on the kitchen floor both of us sloppily and unexpetedly fucked of sudden impulse and me telling her in that fearful afterglow that one day she would see something awful in me, and how after I told her that I made her promise that when she did, she'd look again before going.

We would fall apart: her insecurity, my lack of preparation for a relationship; the way her parents had accidentally taught her to lie first as not just a form of protection, but so that you can get what you really want which most certainly won't be given straight across; the way mine had accidentally taught me to trust the motives of no one because inside the word "love" is the real meaning of "want" and people care for you only so well as they can possess you. So we were open but we were gaurded and she played her games by habit and I called her out on everyone of them I could recognize and some of them that I just imagined even though it wasn't always useful or needed.

Eventually, r and I would see through each other, the way eventually everybody does, and the mysteries would die, and that would be that.

Before all that inevitability though, r and I had fucked for the first time, in the shower, on her bed, in that country home, over and over and over in a twenty four hour period, and in that fucking, I'd lost D all together.

Now she’s in my doorway, her hair cut shorter. Twenty minutes earlier, her face had captivated me and I had wanted her in that stupid way of wanting that causes us to think we’d trade almost anything to really know the girl at who we’re staring.

She asks me what I’ve been up to and I tell her. I ask her the same. We are smiling as if I never didn’t call her back. We are smiling as if I’ve not pressed my mouth against her x and she had not bent her face to mine.

We are smiling as if I hadn’t paused in the hallway to look at her the way you look at a savior.

She bends her wrist to show her ring and says, I got married.

And I smile and ask about the man. And I smile as she tells me she is going to Turkey for a month, to yacht around the Meditation, and she remembers somehow that once upon a time I lived in that part of the world, and I re-like her lips, her teeth, the composure of her face as she talks.

I think of how you cannot keep your hands on a body forever, or even for long, how no matter the depth of the want you’ve fallen into when you come with her, no matter how you think in that glorified moment no more false than any other of our temporary emotions: this is all I want forever and everything is ok…no matter any of this: there will be a release, sometimes sooner than later. Sometimes before you even get to that point.

And the smile on her and the eyes and the body, this full on woman that I knew for a single night just over a year ago, how when she parts I want to follow.

J

I’ve only known one real ladies’ man but it wasn’t as if he thought about it that way. He moved from woman to woman as another means of studying the world; he went from lover to lover because he was restless; mostly, he did these things because he could, and the women let him because he never acted as if he knew of his power. Women loved him in a way that made them want to possess him but also made it so that when they realized they probably wouldn’t be able to possess him, they would give and take what they could just the same.

If you sat drinking wine in his little apartment over the garage in the university town where we lived there would always be some girl in the alley throwing small stones at the little window to ask him to come down or if she could come up.

One of these girls was J, a sort of plain faced girl but with very pretty eyes and a little mole at the corner of her mouth. When I imagine her it is always in a jean skirt though I don’t remember when exactly I saw her wearing it. Her hair was brown and somewhat thin and she always seemed composed, as if in an emergency she would be the one to think it out before reacting.

It was at the time that D was sleeping with her and several other girls that he and I went camping. I was twenty or twenty one and D was five or six years older. I’d noticed as the day progressed that his mood was glum and finally by the fire that night I asked him what was wrong. He looked up and he said, “Dude, I’ve got gray shit coming out of my dick.”

This was Chlamydia and to his credit he intended to call each of the girls from whom it might have come or to whom it might have been given. Against my credit instead, of feeling sympathy for his problem or being moved by the fact he shared it with me, I simply thought: I don’t want to be in the same tent with this person.

I grew up in the AIDS generation but he’d just missed it and so I had a condom in my wallet before I had hair around my x and he’d worn them only when the girl in question insisted.

I’d leave that town after graduation for work on a master’s degree and when I had it, I’d come back, two years later, taking one year off before I sought the final degree in another city. D was gone by then but within the first few weeks of that return I saw J again, working at a restaurant, and we decided to take a drink together. Afterwards, there was a strip club where she seemed hypnotized by the girls that danced and after that we stopped by a video store and rented a porno.

We lie together on the floor without touching for awhile. Before I’d gone away two years earlier, we’d worked together briefly and made out once at a cemetery where we’d gone one night to smoke cigarettes and look at the sky. The first kiss started with what she called a “devil’s hit”, or maybe it was a “double hit”, her drawing on the cigarette then blowing it into my mouth. She wasn’t his girl then, hadn’t been his girl for long, or perhaps it is that she was never his girl, none of them were.

As we watched the film she put her palm flat with the fingers splayed on the front of my jeans, applying pressure to my x. It was all sort of expected and surprising at the same time. We’d engaged in some kind of contract when we went to the strip club, when we rented the video, but neither of us had said anything about sex, and we’d not even kissed.

Soon, I had her pants and shirt off. We stayed on the floor. Her x was of the kind that for me is too internal, a line cut in flesh, not enough around the outside of it, shaved and overly red, and the fucking was unremarkable so that I can’t remember now if we changed positions much or how long it lasted or if there was any coming.

Days later, I woke in the middle of the night hungry. I wrapped myself in a blanket and stopped by the refrigerator where I took a scoop of mashed potatoes and gravy then I ambled on to the bathroom. As I held my x in my fingers and prepared to pee, I saw on the tip of it a brownish clump.

Dude, I’ve got gray shit coming out of my dick.

I cursed him. I cursed her.

I cursed everything, every fuck, the entire loss of my innocence, all of this in a heartbeat, an instance, I mourned who I had once been and what I had become and the price of it apparently leaking out of my x. I longed for a kool-aid and a hot summer day of youth and hot chocolate and sledding and anything at all but girls and strip clubs and pornos and the things they could pump into you.

Then I realized what I was looking at hadn’t leaked out of me. I realized that a bit of potato with gravy had fallen on my x and clung there.

I was relatively young, on my way to a PhD program, no ladies man like D, though often I wanted to be what he was, effortlessly pursued, and tried to learn from him what cannot be learned so fell back to just admiring and sometimes begrudging him his way with women. But it was not my way. And neither did I have his disease, or any.

B

A high school friend calls me on the 7th of July to tell me about a 4th of July accident that resulted in the death of a kid who was a few years behind us in school. Whenever anybody from that old circle dies, B is the one to tell me. Spreading news like this gives him some kind of grim pleasure, the way I remember it giving his mother.

I come from one of those places where more people die than they do in normal places.

This is a place where suicide rates are high, though homicide is fairly low, where people die early of alcohol and cars and monotony.

This is one of those places most people don’t leave any other way.

I am distant from that place, connected to it only through three or four phone calls a year and occasional bouts of nostalgia.

This is one of the places that if you leave you either fairly soon come back or you become really gone.

My friend wants to know before he tells me the kid is dead if I remember the kid, who, of course, is not a kid anymore, just a person I will always remember that way. When he asks if I remember the kid I know why he is called and whose death he is reporting. I say that yes, I remember that kid, that I used to thump him in the head with my class ring.

Not wanting to spoil his buildup to the announcement, I listen as if I don’t know where this is going.

And I don’t say to my old friend the first thing that crosses my mind: of course I remember that kid: his sister’s x was the second I’d touched and the first for any sustained period of time.

Perhaps he remembers anyway. Maybe it has crossed his mind. We were all in the high school play together, the three of us and others that we were witness to the accident. There was a cast party at my house. My parents had just separated but were pretending it was something else. My mother was a wreck but in many ways she never has been anything but.

B and I went upstairs to my bedroom and I don’t remember how we started kissing or how long we did it. She was a pale girl with long brown hair and the body of the basketball star she was. I don’t remember how my hand got down her pants, but I remember that as I was finger fucking her she repeated several times, “It keeps getting bigger and bigger,” talking about her x, not mine, which she never touched.

There was no real point of reference for me, and I, too, was fascinated by the working of her x, the way it wetted and widened, like a hungry thing that could feed itself if the food came close, like a thing that knew more about itself and the world beyond than B or I did. I might have gone on like that, hypnotized, for some long time.

How or when or why we stopped, I don’t remember.

My mother was angry that I’d disappeared for so long and that when I came downstairs my neck was covered with huge bruises. I’d left her alone with all these people and I’d embarrassed her.

We went on, to another friend’s house, a place where his mother would drink with us and the party was real, and overwhelmed by the experience of just proud of it, I told my friends what had happened, and I repeated what B had repeated, that it kept getting “bigger and bigger.”

She found me sometime later. There weren’t tears in her eyes although in retrospect I think my shame would have been less if she’d cried. She said that someone had just told her that I’d been talking about what we’d done and that that someone “knew everything.” As it is with many things, there was no reasonable explanation, nothing much at all to say.

I know she is married now and I imagine she’s forgotten what happened between us. When I evoke a picture of her in my mind, which I don’t have to do—I have my yearbooks—but which I do anyway, I see her with an earnest and strong and almost absolutely resigned face, like that of a pioneer woman.

I could go on a bit about how I wish I’d not talked to others about what had passed between us, and I could try to go on a bit about what this small event meant in my life, but in the context of hers, and all those that will gather to bury her brother, it has no significance. He is a kid who grew up a little and won’t grow up anymore, and pretty soon, maybe today, she stands at his grave, and I imagine on her that pioneer stoicism, the way a frontier woman looks when she buries a husband, a son, a brother…and this is as far as my imagination takes me.

Somebody I've touched is dead and the closest I can get to mourning is a memory of his sister's x.

There are all kinds of things for which we need to forgive ourselves, and that last is for me is amongst them.

A

To my taste this is the third least attractive woman I’ve fucked.
(Or why not write "who fucked me?")

In any case, she was a friend and co-worker, and it had not occured to me to think of her in that way.

Then I saw her take a Midol and suddenly she had an x.

The way it went down you might think I was more the seduced than the seducer but in fact from the moment I read the label on the bottle I think I started to work her with something akin to instinct.

I lived with a girl then, L, and she'd be the first girl I loved with a real love, though I didn't love her at that moment. (And who is to say when love begins? On what day do you wake having crossed that line?)

The three of us had gone drinking and A asked me to drive her from our apartment in her car to her apartment because she was too drunk to drive herself.

At her apartment, she leaned toward me and asked me if I were attracted to her. We were sitting for some reason on a rug on the floor drinking rootbeer schnapps.

This was winter and I knew I had a late night walk of a mile home through the cold. And I knew that L wouldn't wait up with worry. That she wasn't like that. That we weren't.

I said that yes, I was attracted to her.

A said, Then why don't you kiss me?

Within five minutes she had in her mouth my x, less than half erect; she was sucking it up in a way that stretched it out and made me look away.

It isn’t that she wasn’t pretty. Some people thought she was. She was an exercise addict; I remember her calves, how tight they looked, and her little stairstepper ass, and how after my knee surgery she slept half a night beside me on the floor--the only place I felt comfortable sleeping--of the of the apartment I had before moving in with L, and how that night A kept her tiny hand on my shoulder and I only realized it when she got up quietly to go.

There was a wild shock of hair around her x, reminiscent of the hair on those troll dolls you could buy when I was a kid.

We fucked in her bed and she was the first girl who rubbed the area between my x and my xx, snaking her hand down in short and sudden bursts that frightened me. She'd talked a lot recently of a serious boyfriend a year gone and I suppose that was something he liked or she thought he did.

We were both of us drunk, she more than I, and though it was obvious to us both what were doing, that this was a quick and drunken fuck to take care of whatever attraction accidently sprung up between people forced into close quarters--the way we always kind of fall for our co-workers, our cell mates, our arranged spouses--she begin to pull me back on the bed as I was dressing to go.

She said, I keep dreaming of waking up next to you. Stay with me.

I remember the cold of the walk home and the warmth of L, drunk too and sound in her sleep.

I had regret but what made me most contemplative was that it was mild.

I'd learned something though I hardly knew what and at that age really wasn't really set up to bear it. I lie there stiff beside L in the dying dark, wondering who I really was and who I'd really be and looking back now, I'm glad for me and for all of us that our sight is semi-limited.

J

On a beach with my son I realize her x is always with me because he is always with me.

I realize: I can never unknown her, nor do I want to.

How then to write about the x through which your child was delivered?

There was a first fuck, in the Garden of our relationship, before we really knew each other. And all the subsequent fucks like a series of dots you connect to get a sortofpicture of what we were as an us. There was the last fuck, and all the ones before it that were supposed to be the last.

And there is and will always be the possibility of the next fuck.

I’ve been married twice and had many lovers, but I’ve only felt a full sense of intimacy with one woman and the question I ask myself now is: how do you write about her x?

Anal always seems to come after you’ve been fucking the regular way for long enough to get sort of used to it. Your hand is on her ass—maybe she put it there—and then it’s working its way down—and maybe she’s pushing it in that direction.

Sooner or later, you’re going to rest a finger against that hole. Sooner or later, you’re going to let the tip slip in almost as if by accident.

Sooner or later, the idea of that kind of fucking is going to get into your head like obsession.

There’s no open discussion of this and we’re innocent enough to think that it ought to be done in something like ceremony to keep it separated from our regular sex lives. Afterwards, those two types of fucking will meld and what we call regular will continually require redefinition.

(You start with your fingertip barely touching her xx like an accidental hint she takes also as if by accident, and you find you’ve started on a path that leads to many paths, and if you are with this woman long enough you will walk them all, if indeed you mean to keep walking).

She wears a black dress and no panties and is leaning over a couch we wouldn’t want to see in good light. This is in a little room you can rent in an adult book store while the video you handed the counter guy plays on a television in the wall. J is looking over her shoulder at the video and I’m looking at her.

She’s not my wife yet, and though I think I know her well just the same, the expression of fascination on her face is something I’ve never seen on her before. To the way she is standing and looking and even, I imagine, breathing, there is not just an openness, but an unparalleled eagerness.

I lift her dress and lean across her back and she strains her neck to kiss my mouth.

I have a picture of J: she is standing in a pool, and the water halfway up her chest must strike her as cold because she has folded her arms; her hair is wet and there is an expression of faraway focus in her eyes, a sort of beautiful sadness, and if you want to see it, imagine Sophie Loren.

We’re in this porn store booth because we believe to do something so dirty we must be somewhere dirty, because since it seems to us we’re going off some carnal dive into depravity, we aught do it in a way that is depraved.

Of course, I’m only pretending I think it’s depraved.

Porno births, ass fucking, all of this is part of what I consider my secret darkness.

Yet here we are and she kisses hard and grinds her ass against my pants.

(And in retrospect it occurs to me that to corrupt is not to introduce darkness into her—who has that power?—but to introduce somebody to the darkness organic to her).

Here we are in the buzz of a breaking taboo that will when fully broken will become something sort of like addiction. Let us go places we never meant to go but deep down must want to. Or perhaps it is just the going we want. That kind of pushing.

I kneel and kiss her ass and then slide my tongue down the line that grows from the base of her spine until my tongue presses against her xx. She shutters and I sink a finger into her x, which is wetter than I’ve ever known it. She rolls her hips and she never takes her eyes off the television. Occasionally, I turn to it as well, but then her hand is in my hair, pulling my mouth back round.

(And for those glimpses I can see them both, these years later, a sandy haired man and a tight haired woman on the roof of a building in the broad daylight.)

I stand and unbutton my pants and smear the lubricant on my x and then smear it around her xx. The penetration is easier than we expected—and on the next few efforts, we’ll be surprised by the level of pain and difficulty, as if we made it that first time through luck and adrenalin.

We’re fucking. We’ll have to walk out, our clothing straightened, feeling like the man and everybody in the store know precisely what we’ve done, and maybe they do. We’ll have to cross the parking lot exposed not just to the people that frequent and work at porno shops, but the world at large as well, all these regular people who would never dream of ass fucking or watching dirty movies or the things we ourselves haven't dreamnt of yet but will. We’ll have to lean into each other, taking solace in the idea that what we’ve done we’ve done together and if we are judged we are judged as one.

I’m fucking her ass with my hands on her waist, thinking vaguely that this is so much I want more, whatever that might be.

And you don't do this because it feels slightly different on your x; you do this because it feels different in your mind: a deeper kind of surrender. You do this because nobody you know admits they do. I push in most of the way and one of her hand flutters back, wanting to take me by the hip but not quite making it, and her eyes are on the television but they are not focused and I freeze so that I can freeze this moment, so that I can stand still enough to remember it perfectly, the cut of her face in that light, the reverse curve of her back, that suspended hand.

Maybe by then I know that I love her. Maybe she knows she loves me. I don’t suppose I could imagine marriage, insemination, birth, divorce. Perhaps though the powers of transcendence we believe we attain in the purest moments of fucking do take me that far. Maybe I saw all of it, and all of this, and beyond.

We’re fucking in the light of the television and that is her ass, small and with the tan lines visible, her ass, the only ass in the world—for a little while, the only thing in the world—the black dress rolled up on top of it, my x appearing and disappearing into it like a magic trick rewound and replayed and rewound again.

And she comes hard.

And I come.

A decade later, I’ll walk on the beach with my son, and I’ll think about how J is always with me. We talk on the phone and sometimes in person about our lives, who we are seeing, what they seem to mean to us, and I always wonder about the men in her life, if they fuck that way. As for me, I’ve fucked other girls in the ass and yet with J when I think about what I lost she it the only one where it is complete, where it seems to me I lost every bit, which means I had every bit to lose.

I suppose that denotes a deeper love.