J

There was a living room so big and so empty you could play football in it, and sometimes I did. This is LA and this is me and J and J, roommates, and from our windows you could see the Hollywood sign in one direction, palm trees fading out into Beverly Hill, Santa Monica, supposedly the Pacific.

I'm starting to think about thinking, but maybe I'm not starting soon enough, like the man on the Purgatory path to Heaven in Dostevesky; he sits for a thousand years frurstrated at the length of the road before he begins to walk it.

My bed in this apartment is cheap and overly used; there is a tv on a cardboard box with a sheet over it at the foot of the bed. What we are is young and far from home, and in that apartment, high as it is, there is always a breeze.

We rarely meant to fuck but we often did.

This is J, who has never had sex, never had a drink. We wrestle and engage in mock torture, the way children do when they are testing the limits of power and touching the pleasure of cruelty. It dissipates into my fingers on her x, like an accident, then a finger inside, followed eventually by a sort of non-penetrating fuck, and then a penetrating one, with her eyes rolling back and her mouth open and this semi-seizure like state that implies danger and frightens me out.

This or something similiar a few times becomes habit, a once a week or so sort of thing. Other nights, I have dates. Sometimes, I bring J as a buffer, when I'm getting tired of a girl. We do most everything together. Work. Study in the same Master’s program, take the same classes. The grocery store. The gym. We eat on the floor with bowls in our hands. This is the soup she made. This is the bread I bought.

We are not playng house. I don't think we are. Maybe I just don't think.

Each time we fuck it is an accident and will be the last, unless another accident happens. I’m so young, I’m not even trying to understand it. Everything is so fresh, I don’t even know that you ought to try to figure it out.

In this city, at this time, I’m a novelty, the kid from the country, and somehow, that makes me attractive, so I’m fucking a lot. This is where I realize that women like men like to fuck. If I were smart, I’d be overwhelmed. If I were more conscious, I’d be trying to make sense of it all. Me and J and the other J, for that matter, and me and any girl fucking on my bed in front of the television on the card board box with the sheet over it.

To be human, that’s what we do. We try to know what it all means. As if it does.

I see x’s everywhere, in the clouds, in cuts on trees, in the way a napkin falls. For a time, way back then, I believe that the common odor that underlies every x I’ve known is on my skin, as if I am turning into a giant x, like a further perversion of the Gregor Samsa story.

I hold my wrist to J’s nostrils and ask her to smell and she indulges me and says, “Yes, pussy.”

A Black girl, quite thin, from a northern city, and she was going to think she loved me though she was going to claim no so such affection. And I was going to go on blindly, into every cave, past every fossil, with none of Da Vinci's fear, nor his examination, certainly not their fruits.

We’re roommates, we’re friends, sometimes we fuck, and that is all. This is what I tell myself.

She kicks a part a puzzle I’m building. I say, “You’re going to get it now.” She gives me a hard stare. I rise. She runs even though there is nowhere to go and she doesn’t really want to get away. I catch her in the hallway. We roll to the floor. She fights hard, even though in winning she would lose, and there is no winning.

So far, all of this could be legitimate violence.

She’s pinned. Her breasts are as flat as they can get beneath my weight. Her nightshirt is all the way up her thighs. I lick her face. She squirms. I lick it again, her cheeks, her lips.

It goes from there.

She checks on me late. “You’re having a nightmare.” I don’t know. I’m suddenly awake and she is pushing into my bed telling me I’m afraid. I start to believe that I am. She is holding my head, telling me that at this moment I need somebody to do that. She’s telling me things I’m not sure of, but in that late dark you are going to believe whoever it is that speaks. Her hands on my shoulder, kneading them.

It goes from there.

She drops a milk carton full of water off the balcony and it explodes behind me as I leave the building. She throws a vodka oj under my comforter one night when I have two girls over and we invite J and all get drunk together; I’ve made out with each of the girls and when I see the sheets all yellow I think at first one of them has crawled in their and vomited or peed.

She breaks a cd and puts pieces of it in my shoe.

“I wanted you to bleed,” she says.

She knew her mother loved her when her mother chased her out of the house with a loaded handgun.

God’s truth, this behavior is a mystery to me. I’m a kid from the rez, from a mountain state, from small towns and under developed ideas. I’m trying to find my way into the world but if I think about something, it is how to fuck this girl as opposed to what that fucking means.

This is me, bleeding in my shoe, the cut like a mouth that means to tell you to wake up.

With me she learns to drink, to fuck. You could say I am the corrupter but it really isn’t fair. Both of us are going to leave our gardens. All of us, every day, its further into the wilderness. We’re supposed to progress toward from an Eden through an earth almost like hell to a heaven that is like Eden and maybe it is so but what I sense with her then and anybody now and everything really is more know to me as Milton’s Anarch, and there is no real journey.

She says, “I’ll never put a man’s cock in my mouth.”

I see her in the moonlight, on the floor with me, she’s kissing my thighs. I wonder if she will. I know she will. Everybody eventually will. We will do all the things that are done. We will become everything we have time to become. My x is in her mouth. Who knows what hunger keeps it there, what love, what hatred?

Because she said she wouldn’t be she does, I am rapt. Her face in the moonlight. Her mouth that I’ve kissed and will kiss again. Everything is made new.

We live together a year, these two girls and me, but this is about the second J, and we fuck probably fifty times. She becomes the first woman to go lower, to my xx, her head between my thighs, her hand pumping my x furiously.

What does it mean, that that can be done, that it is done, that is done to me, that I enjoy it, that this girl who never even touched an x before does it, that she wakes me in the night and wrestles with me in the day? The milk carton explodes and I dive forward as if from a bomb. The earthquake has come and gone but we all remember.

I believe in true love and marriage and perfect lives. I go through girls, tell myself I’m looking for love, and, in fact, I am looking for something more than flesh, though I think I’ll find it in the flesh, this magic x that once you touch it your hand will stay, your heart will ease. I grew up on sitcoms and love songs. Here I am.

Think.

(All these people falling in the dark stretching out to touch each other as they pass.)


She lying face first on my bed, one arm stretched back, the fingers of that hand in her mouth, I’m backwards and straddling her, masturbating over her ass, coming that way, that notsowhite splatter against her notsodark skin.

(When I think of the word "orgasm" I think of the word "demoralized".)

People write to make meaning, the same reason they pray, the same reason they read, the same reason they try to hear god. And what does it mean, my come on her back, the broken cd in my shoe, any of it, any of this?

These are posts in every one I try to get a hold of something and in each I sort of do and there is more that runs through my fingers than there is that I grip and regardless of what I squeeze up in the ball of my fist and tap into the screen, I know that all these meanings are false.

This is a blog about vaginas, and when I’m being honest, the most that I can say is that it is about the chaos, inside of them and outside of them. And maybe it was then, with this girl or one or another of the others, that I really begin to try to make sense of it all.

What a long road it is that leads us to understand the important and true question is not so much about what it means, but about what it doesn't.

J

We’d dressed as Adam and Eve, and what do you expect when you go out and come back like that?

Plastic leaves stapled to underwear, all that flesh, from the garden of the party, this girl who drank so much once upon a time she didn’t drink at all, and me, drunk, with our apple, the prop, we were friends, that’s how it started, and you might say good affairs start that way, or you might say the really good ones start with the immediate sparks that want to feel like destiny, but in any case, there she is leading me around by the apple, I’m trying to get my teeth into it, but she pulling it away. The game is tease and all we really are is a show and when finally I bite the apple it’s time for us to go.

Later, we’d be roommates, and we’d fuck once then, too, but this was the building where we met, the party where it started, me stripping Eve, her stripping Adam, in an apartment that would be destroyed by earthquake in a city that is the final proving ground for Western civilization, LA, and to think of her is to think of it, and to think of it is to think of her.

We talk sometimes even now on the phone, the days she lived with me and the other J, who will also be blogged, in the expensive but empty high rise apartment; sometimes we talk about the little building that fell and some even rarer times we talk about how we fell together there, that bed.

Her smoker’s mouth, her body with those long muscles, this Native American girl who was like me far from home, she’s beneath me, she is as nude as Eve and I am as nude as Adam, moving into her and almost out, my thumb the untrimmed hair of her x, and this is fucking or whoknowswhat and there is no god to witness, no devil to tempt; if we feel shame it is for other reasons and if we feel love it is for other reasons, too.

We were basically kids and we never held hands because we weren’t like that though for awhile she thought she wanted to be. There was a dog on a street corner, starved and dying and I sat with him for an hour, getting him to drink water from a bottle, waiting for J to come with food and call the animal control.

We were innocent and we thought of how they’d groom him, all hairless ribs, all dried out nose, make him well, find him a home; they never showed and so finally we took him. He nipped at us but there wasn’t much to it; he sat there in the backseat as we drove; the man came out of the building, pulled the dog from the car, wrapped a leash around its mouth so that it would not be able to bite, and then the dog and the man were gone and we felt we’d done something wrong.

She is a poet and I remember reading the poem she wrote about it and it feeling for the first and only time that I could see my life for real in art, this dusty moment, this prelude to death; it made me cry and still does.

That first night she was mostly still beneath me and I don’t think we went for long. It was indulgent, perhaps we didn’t think enough about what things meant or might seem to or what the consequences might be; perhaps we didn’t know enough about the world to think like that.

It is, in any case, one of those memories that has mostly faded, along with the other time we fucked, as if nothing permanent came of that particular touching, though something as close to permanent as I know came to us just the same, this long term friend.

In the high rise apartment more than a year after the Halloween party, before we all moved away, sometime after the second time we fucked, I went to get her from her room one afternoon and she told me to wait; I could see through the slats in the door as she moved across her floor. She was nude from the waist down and I was watching her without her knowing it. There were her long legs, pretty and light brown, the black patch of hair, the distinct shape of her ass, all of it visible to me as if I’d never seen it, and, indeed, it felt I hadn’t, so I stood there still and quiet and watched her pull on her jeans.

It is as precious to me a moment as any.

D

The important thing to remember about this one is that it was because of a girl who wasn’t interested. I was in the city of my old habits and I was there because I missed them, as if they were really broken.

So I’d returned for an extended vacation and I left a woman waiting and someday I would marry her, and the important thing to remember about this one is not that it was because of a girl who wasn’t interested, but that it was because of this one I married that girl.

The important thing to remember is that both of those “because”’s are tentative. I might have married who I did and almost when anyway. I might have fucked D anyway.

The girl that wasn’t interested was a friend of a friend in a group of friends and it is easier to describe a girl’s lack of interest than it is to describe a girl’s interest, but all we really want to talk about are the girls who say yes.

The girl that wasn’t interested, a V or a K or an S, something like that, she said, “Oh my God, that’s D…”.

Who was D?

An athlete. An Olympian. She’d won a medal. One of those sports where the woman in question is strong and lithe and flexible, where you watch her do her thing and you want to fuck her, whoever she is, just because she can do it. She’d been on the cover of Newsweek or Time, one of those magazines, but I’d never seen that picture.

She wasn’t really very pretty.

So I went for an autograph of a famous girl I didn’t recognize to impress a girl that wasn’t interested and wouldn’t be.

The bartender called her by her first name and when it was time to go and we lingered the bouncers did, too, gently and firmly, saying her name, D, and that we had to leave. The next day we had lunch and I went with her while she bought a wet suit and then we went to her high rise apartment and begin by making out in the afternoon on the floor while looking at photo albums full of people I did, in fact, recognize.

You come to the city of your old habits and she is precisely who you mean to accomplish.

After her, where else is there to go? At least not if we understand these things to be about something other than connection. And when you go to a city of your so called old habits, it is not connection you seek. If anything, you’re there to escape it.

This one is about how you end up married for the first time.

She wasn’t very pretty, at least not to my taste, but she had this body, and she was known, and that was supposed to make her valuable. There were other reasons for her value, as is there is with anyone but what did I know of them?

Afterwards, almost immediately, I’d find myself leaning over glass counters in jewelry stores trying to buy an engagement ring. Afterwards, I’d return early to the city of my so called new start, and there I’d begin working on my first marriage, my first divorce.

Old habits. New starts.

She kneeled on the bed and looked over her shoulder. There were tears of toilet paper all around her x. This can, it does, happen to anybody. She was a famous girl, her face on the cover of a magazine in an album of memories that I think were fading fast as she tried to live in the life after.

I didn’t find her pretty, but this wasn’t about pretty, and I didn’t find her engaging, but this wasn’t about that kind of engagement. Little pieces of toilet paper, like you wear on your face after a bad shave, her ass raised, her stomach sunk, her shoulder up, her hair on her shoulders, her face turned, her mouth open.

I went in and she sunk forward.

Afterwards, if you asked me then, I would have told you that that was the last time I’d ever fuck like that. Maybe I meant it. Maybe it’s mostly born out.

Maybe and mostly.

She sucked my fingers as we fucked. Her lovers had been bad, in bed and outside of it, a string of them, and we fucked hard, mostly with me behind her, for a long time. Her makeup was coming off but that didn’t bother me. There were tears of toilet paper moistened to her x, but I tried not to care.

It was afterwards, while she dressed, while she reapplied her makeup, while I stood at the window higher up than I’d felt climbing anything else, stairs or trees or mountains, that everything bothered me: that I was in her apartment, that we’d have to ride down together in the elevator, that she’d have to drive me to place I was staying, that this stranger, who some people knew but I did not, this girl that you find pretty in her craft, I’d have to be alone with her more and close, though I did not feel close, though I did not feel like being alone with anybody but myself.

This is the deflation that comes after I’ve come, only this time, I hadn’t come.

The important thing to remember is that it all starts when I mean to impress a girl who could not care less. Or the important thing to remember is it all ends with a marriage to a girl who could hardly care more.

I don’t know. Maybe those are the important things.

X

This take place in Aspen, with C, a friend from my youth and still a virgin, our 21st summer, seven or eight years after his brother died in a town to which I’ve returned, the place of my childhood, as if I might find something I think I’ve left there, whatever peace, whatever innocence. We drive every weekend the 45 miles into Aspen, a pass up and over the Divide, a dangerous stretch of highway, one of the bloodiest in the country, too many rock falls, too many zigzags, too narrow the road, too excited the travelers.

The girls are three, a tall Black woman you’d think of as a model, all poise and beauty, in a full length coat too hot for the weather, her older Anglo friend, with an odd gap in her front teeth, attractive just the same, at least in the vodka glow, in the bar lights, and short plump woman, the fifth wheel, who approved of none of this.

They all worked at a phone company and had gone on vacation together. Strange friends, it seemed, not that C and at this point weren’t, so many years separating us that we didn’t know each other, the death of his brother, a twin, between the now and when we’d played together as kids, a certain meridian. But here I was back and the town was that small, what else was there to do but for the two of us to try to know each other again?

I started with the gap toothed woman because her friend seemed out of my league. Drunk and young and showing off for C, I slid a cube of ice on the palm of my hand up her nyloned leg, and in this game of chicken, she never said “give”, never did anything but smile so that finally it came to rest against the taut fabric of panty beneath nylon, and she smiled and leaned to me and said that I was bad, the way a girl says it when she means it as a compliment.

By the time we’d climbed the little fence to their hotel swimming pool, I’d somehow traded over. The Black girl and I were in the hottub, overlooking the pool, where C was holding the side and trying to back float while the gap toothed girl sucked his x.

My fingers were inside the Black girl, beneath bikini bottoms, that odd sensation of penetrated flesh under water. She was leaning over the side of the hot tub, watching, her ass slightly raised, letting me do whatever I did. We fucked in that position a time so short that C and the girl below had not finished before we did.

It was all sort of surreal. I was trying to put myself in the moment, to appreciate the spectacle of her ass half out of the water, the muscle of her back, the fall of her damp hair. She wasn’t there, though, not really, and the first time I withdrew, she turned over and folded her legs and that was that. We went and sat quietly in the dark hotel room, not touching while the plump friend snored and C and the gap toothed girl did whatever they did out there in the pool.

It was the only fuck of that summer, a summer of transition.

It was late when we left and the buzz had worn off all of us. If anything, I felt frustrated. I’d not pushed for enough, had taken nothing of value, and C, and the gap toothed girl, they seemed at perfect ease.

On the drive home, he kept telling it to me over and over: Did you see how I fucked that girl? I fucked her so good…

And I was bored and even envious and thinking that I should have stuck with her, that her reaction to my hand beneath the table told me everything I needed to know, and I wanted C to shut up, and finally he did.

In that silence, we crossed the Continetnal Divide and started down the other side of the pass in that late dark, that near dawn.

The road turned sharply, the car did not. We crossed the yellow lines. We shot out onto the pull off where in the day cars would park and overlook the valley below.

There was the gravel and the tires and there was me screaming: Wake up!

And there was the braking and the sliding of the car and when it settled and the dust stopping falling I got out and measured with my eyes three feet between where we’d finally stopped and where we would have begun to die.

He was my childhood friend, along with his brother, who had drowned in the lake over which our town looked, his body never recovered, his house, with the best view of the water, standing like a tombstone. We ran around the forests, playing soldier, playing knight, sticks fashioned into bows and arrows, swords and guns; we’d point to the top of the mountains and talk about the ranch we’d have up there some day, on the great bald dome, three houses and three wives, three friends that would go on and on forever, the way you want to think love lasts.

I’d returned and two of us were sort of grown up, and one of us had never been to prom, never touched an x, never had a good or bad fuck, would never father a child, would never read or write this or anything like it.

I stood there with the headlights shining out into the darkness and the terrible drop off below and my sleepy eyed friend telling me to get in, he’d drive more carefully.

I got in.

The stars were going to disappear.

I said, Tell me again about how you fucked her.

G

So you find yourself with a pill bottle, eight pills inside. This costs you one hundred dollars outside a nightclub, an impulse buy. You’re with a girl and she says, Yes, let’s get them.

These pills, they’re Viagra, and after you and the girl fuck with one of the pills in your system, you ask the girl, Could you tell?

She’s not sure. She wants to know if you could tell. Well, there is the fact that your erection is back. Again. And again.

And, you think, it felt a bit more swollen, a bit closer to bursting.

The next morning, there is the fact that you wake up especially hard.

So yeah, sort of, you can tell.

And what worries you, why you don’t fuck around with those pills after that: what if you start to need to take them? Like sleeping pills. One night you just realize: the only really good sleeps left in my life are going to come from sleeping pills.

Cut to: a different girl sometime before who wants to prove she cares for you and so gives you a bottle of prescription sleeping pills. There are only a few, a half dozen left, and you’d call it an act of kindness, but you know the girl and thus you know that everything she gives she gives in hopes of a higher return. These pills, they make you overly dizzy so you don’t use them up; rather, you keep them. Think of this as a backup. Or maybe a souvenir.

Both these girls have been blogged.

Cut to: a girl that hasn’t.

Cut to: the pills sitting in their bottles half a year later, sort of forgotten, in a new apartment.

And you sitting on the couch with this new girl. This is a pretty girl, but there are problems. This is an ex-stripper, and that’s not one of the problems. You were married to a stripper once upon a time and though that fairy tale ended darkly, you’ve got nothing against strippers. In fact, she wasn’t even a stripper when you met her.

This new girl, G, she is a girl who drops names. She dated so and so and so and that pro whatever and this producer.

Really, a producer, let’s look him up, what’s he made?
Well, only commercials…

This list of men. It’s not that you don’t believe she knows them; it the word “date” that you question. This is a girl men want to fuck, probably too much for their own good or hers.

And she’s got friends, rich men, she doesn’t fuck them, but they take her places and buy her things. They really care about her. This is what she tells you. She might even believe it.

What she’s doing with you is its own little mystery, because you aren’t buying her anything, and this your second date is a dvd in your apartment, and the only reason you have this date is because the first one ended with a surprisingly swell make out section.

Surprisingly swell.

But now, you feel tired. In life, you might say. Of it, whatever you want to mean by it. And you know like a good prophet there’s nothing here, nothing substantial—barely, to be honest, any attraction.

You’re here, you’ve let her here, out of habit, but here you are.

This is me with a girl in my apartment who doesn’t really belong there. There is a candle burning in my bedroom and a number of condoms in the sock drawer. The girl is on the couch and I’m on the couch and this is a familiar scene. But honestly, really, I’m not in it.
Habit habit habit.

Yeah, go ahead and try to get yourself born again. If you broke every habit you have you wouldn’t even be alive. The entire structure of you life is built around habits, good and bad and natural.

She’s pretty, a girl who would photograph well, and tall, and thin, twenty five and she’s going to lose it. Then what? Gym memberships and plastic surgery and all that. She’ll be ok. She’s got all that coming and she doesn’t mind it. All of this is as natural to her life as getting a driver’s license is to anybody’s.

This pretty girl, and not bad, but personality wise, we’re not meshing. She insults your apartment the moment she steps inside, one of those girls always trying to maintain position by putting things beneath them. Seeing what they can squash so that they can stand a little taller on it. She figures if you’re on edge than you won’t notice that she is.

What this is about is control. She’s trying to be in it. Who isn’t? Poor girl. I don’t blame her.

It’s really rather grim. The movie plays. The couch is large. If you could have guessed you’d have a girl like her some time ago, say when you were seventeen, if you could have imagined it, you would believe that your life was going to be perfect. What else could a scene like this denote?

For one night with one single girl like her, you would have traded ten years of your life. Once upon a time.

But now?

Actually, you probably wouldn’t go through with it. Really.

But the girl, she’s aggressive. The girl, she says, What’s wrong with you? The movie is almost over and you haven’t touched her, though her long legs are pushing her bare feet up against your folded thighs.

She means; Why aren’t you moving on me?

The question to ask yourself about now, it is: Why’s she pushing it? Does she really just want to fuck? Does anybody?

You can’t answer that question. Neither can I. But she’s pushing forward. She is saying, anyway, that she wants to fuck.

So fuck it Habit habit habit.

She says, Let’s go to your bedroom.

What I do, I go to the kitchen and open the cabinet door behind which I keep my medicines, the vitamins and cold remedies and the Viagra and the sleeping pills. I grab a bottle, shake out a pill, trying to move fast, not wanting her to know, sort of shaky with the idea of doing something I shouldn’t times two.

Something solid bothers me, but I’m not sure what. I tell myself, This whole thing is off, that’s all.

I pop the pill, rush the bedroom, she’s quick to undress, that ex stripper body, long and lean and moving by habit in those stripper ways, from stripper vogue to stripper vogue, and after just a little while, my x feels extra hard. I feel especially full. She’s been down on my x for half a minute and I’ve been down on her for probably five, a girl who knows that a man likes it when she makes sounds of pleasure not just while his mouth is against her x, but when his x is in her mouth, too. As if she likes it there. As if as much as anything, for her this is about x.

She says only two men have made her come. This, I know, you know, she knows, it’s a set up. It’s so that when she seems to come it will seem significant. Ask yourself again: Why?

(You could get caught on that question. You and me both. All the time, over and over, every second of every fuck and the moments that precede them: why?)

But hell, it’s out of my hands. I’m all hopped up on my Viagra.

It’s got me going so good I wish I wanted to be doing this.

She goes through a routine that may or may not be coming. It finishes in collapse, like what a dancer does at the end of a song.

Can you come? she asks me.

I’d rather not, I say. This is me just being honest

Ok, she says. This is her, not being honest.

I want her to leave, and I imagine that even she sort of wants to leave, so I tell her that I have trouble sleeping with a near stranger in my bed. This is true. I tell her I have to be up early. This is not true.

Let’s see how it goes, she suggests. Maybe you’ll fall asleep. If not, I’ll go.

I agree. After about ten minutes, she gets up and starts dressing.

I’m going to go, she says.

Ok.

But I stand up to take her out to her car, and before we get anywhere, she kisses me. I’m erect, easily and strongly, and I sink her back to the bed and tug down her slacks and I go down on her for some long time and then we get to fucking again, and I think as I fuck: Damn, she was almost gone.

Something is still wrong. I already know what, have always know what, just not in the conscious part of my mind. It’s like a pebble in your shoe. You’re aware and then not really and then you just sort of resigned.

To get it out, you have to really think about.

I do. It hits me. Mid fuck.

Cut to: sleeping pills.

I took the sleeping pills. Not the Viagra.

And all that voodoo, this idea of the more swollen dick, it’s gone. And the voodoo of the sleeping pill, it hits. I’m worried that like some narcoleptic, I’m going to fall asleep on the girl. Color me instantly tired.

She is so focused on me coming, it’s as if this is all she’s here for, as if if I come while fucking her, she’s accomplished something, and me, I’m just dizzy tired, sickly fatigued, fucking away.

So I fake it.

Now we’re done.

And then, here’s the trick, I’ve got to make her think I can’t sleep. So that she’ll agree to go again. I’ve got to make her think that her presence is keeping me up, and, as she knows, I’ve got to be up early. The melding of the lie and the truth which perfectly captures the essence of the night.

The problem is, I keep dozing off. And then in my half wake, my half sleep, I worry about her being there, in the morning. She really is a stranger, and this really is my room, my bed, and all that really means something to me.

So I fight the pills. The pills are strong. Who, or should I say what, is going to win?

You’re not tired, I tell myself. Maybe you really did take the Viagra, I tell myself.

But the chemistry of it is beyond just what I believe. The sleeping pills are in my blood. The girl is in my bed. The Viagra is in the bottle.

Try to stay awake. Pop open your eyes. The girl, she’s watching you. Look around. You’ll see this room, a relatively new room, like you’ve never seen it before. The corners. The doors of the bathroom, the closet, the nightstand. The blinds and the traffic beyond them. You try to focus on everything, be aware of everything to keep yourself awake, but you go sliding into what you look at, what you think about.

The pills vs your brain.

(To lead a good life, you have to be as conscious as possible.)

Not every bind you find yourself in is your fault. But this one, let’s be honest: this is all about what a fuck up I can be.

J and c and x

To remember either J or c is to remember a particular era, my pre fucking days, to be certain, but more specifically, I’m talking about autumn and the first real grown up girlfriends of what was supposed to be the beginning of my real grown up life. To think about either is less to think about her than it is to feel myself at eighteen. It is to think about a particular fall, one of thirty three, and though the leaves tumble in the same way every year, the feeling I get when I think of these particular leaves, those particular girls, that particular fall, it is absolutely distinct.

I suppose in fact every day is distinguishable, but from so far forward, it just becomes one lump, the way our lives seem when they are paragraph summarized, the way these girls might seem if one doesn’t take a moment to really recall.

J and I, we’re always on the living room floor of my mother’s house, a few blocks from campus, that university neighborhood, this four-years-until-graduation-and-beyond-life; it’s the middle of the day, almost always; her running pants are half pulled down, this Indian girl with slightly bad skin, the salty flavor of her x when I go below, like a diver without good lungs, submerging and after a few seconds, surfacing; she squirms beneath my touch, a girl not certain if the pleasure of it overrides the guilt or whatever it is that causes us unease in our moments of hunger sating.

The air, it has that quality, you know it, wherever you live, we all do; it cools and it grays and you can smell things which were once green turning back into earth, fall when people start to start fires.

Those are the steps of the mailman, heavy on the porch, and there he is, passing the open blinds, and whether or not he sees us, accidentally displayed like the kids we are trying to find our way into sex, I don’t know, lying there together in that soft autumn light, the sun like an egg yolk, the stripe shadows of the blinds running across us. The mail falls through the slot. J strokes my x for a minute at a time then abandons it, like an item in a store you pick up and think about buying but return to the shelf, over and over again.

J has said to me the first “dirty” thing I remember a woman, at least a woman I knew, that first night walking from the porch of my mother’s home where we had been kissing, down the street lamp sidewalks, across the campus, to her dorm room, a time early between us, before I’d seen her x or could really believe she had one, and she said: “I’m a mess.”

And maybe she thought I wouldn’t understand or maybe she took it for granted that I would but in any case, I did, and the world changed a little. There were girls out there, clean girls with whom you held hands, and they actually acknowledged their x’s.
Girls you sat beside in classrooms and saw at bookstores, they had them, too, x’s, and those x’s could become a mess based on something you did with her: this is the kind of world you wanted to live in but didn’t dare think you did. Look at it open in front of you. This is fall and what you feel like is your going to have all the experiences that grow you up.

And later, the girl from my first college math class, c, with her long relaxed curl that reddish color now back in fashion, a slightly Asiatic face, her penchant for lying, her long legs, and her long ass, like two oval stones rising out of the stream, I transition into her, this way of trading not necessarily up, but away, that men have; we are collectors by nature and what we think about are not the things in our collections but the things outside of them, the ones we don’t have, the explorer not interested in the map he’s drawn but the one he hasn’t.

c comes with me back to my home town to watch the high school play, this is already nostalgia fodder, and everything there is so small and everything feels so strange that it grows unbearable. It is not place to bring a girl. She tells me stories about her father on the long ride home, fascinations, really, her imagination running away with her, and me in the dark silence listening and believing.

Not long after we stand in my mother’s living room and c’s slacks, they’re black, I unbutton them, and she holds them up, one hand clasping fingers on the button side and the button hole side, as I lead her into the bedroom.

I can’t remember anything about her x except the shock of touching it (like that first shock years before with a sweaty girl from the fair whose x I didn’t expect to be wet and so I imagined was bleeding and so I pretended I heard something and ran round the corner of the church where we’d gone to make out and held my fingers up in the streetlight—no blood—and then {what would any of us so young do, this desire to know?} I sniffed).

She’s on the bed, the comforter, my mother’s bed, my mother’s comforter, this long girl, c, with her pants off now, and her panties down, and me, I know that I want to want to fuck her.

But: whereas J and I seemed to be pushing into something together, mutually uncertain and uncomfortable, c feels ages ahead of me, and so what I think when I’m being honest with my thoughts is that I’m not ready for her.

Or it. She looked much less dangerous with her underwear on.

So it’s simple: I am afraid.

Thin and worried about being nude in front of a woman; underexperienced and worried about when I’ll come and how, and if I can really get it in, and how I should compose my face and whether or not I’ll be too loud or too quiet.

It’s almost Thanksgiving and has gotten cold and for a little while I miss J; we were together at a Halloween party, and that wasn’t long ago, but it feels like a simpler time, laughing in our costumes, drinking with our masks pushed up on our heads, this little lesson in how you’ll regret whatever you leave, the places and the people.

c’s waiting, expectant, I imagine, ready to be made love to, fucked, taken to other worlds. Ready to have happen to her all kinds of things I don’t know how to do but want to. The simple wish of my youth, I’d make it on any falling star: I wish I could make a woman come just by looking in her eyes.

I go into the bathroom, come out bare save a towel around my waist—it might as well be a white flag—carrying an unwrapped condom—it might as well be a last place ribbon—and something in all of this pushes c away, or she’d already changed her mind while I was undressing and wrapping myself and then unwrapping the condom.

She laughs, begins to dress. This semi-rejection feels too easy, as if this is exactly the way it should go, and I catch it with near relief.

She drifts. I drift. These two girls, in the fall of the first year of my supposed adult life, these girls who came and went before the first snow, that long ago and faraway.

And the patterns of my fights with women, they were set with these girls, the way I was with them some reduced but recognizable image of the lover I now am, so too was I some reduced but recognizable image of the enemy I can seem to become; the way I bully, the ways in which I’m wrong and right, the pettiness and insecurity that comes out under cover when I argue, you could see it all with either of them, the way you could see, if you looked close enough and at the right times, my absolute amazement with the body of the woman, any woman, when it is revealed, my fascination with her x and the idea that she is actually sharing it with me; you can color me awed from then till now and so it is apparent who I am, good and bad and everything else, from the beginning, when I am green and underbloomed, till whatever this is, this time, the middle I guess.

J and c, not my first real lovers, or even my first x’s, but my first somethings or another; if you define a woman particularly enough, she’s going to be a first something. And it may seem even to me that I miss them both, or at least one or the other, but this isn’t true. I wouldn’t really want to sit over tea with J or sink into a bathtub full of warm water with c; I wouldn’t want to share pictures of our children.

It’s that old me, it’s that old season, the freshman boy in the small city, with his towel and his condoms and his middle of the day explorations of territory both in and out of myself that was absolutely new, that’s what I miss.

L

In the story your parents tell, there was a statue of bronze in the shape of a nude woman that acted as the base of a lamp at your aunt’s house. In this story, you are two years old and every time you visit that aunt, you stroke the lamp and babble to it. Eventually, for some unrelated reason, the aunt gets rid of the lamp, and in the story your parents tell about you, the next time you visit you go and stand where it had been and you wail.

Freud suggests that we lose some love, often our mother, and that the people we bring close to us after that face our unconscious resentment for not being that lost love, so we begin to torture them as a form of punishment.

I’d like to say that L is that first lost girl, and despite the fact she’s not the first girl I said it to, she is most certainly she’s the first girl I loved. Still, in truth, you could see in how I related to her some strain of torment, the way boys get when girls get close and they don’t know what to do, all the awful things we offer up, hard and cold and demanding, the way at times a man can seem devoid of care.

Say about her that she is a meridian: that on one side of her I am one thing, and on the other, I am something else. It is not so much that she changed me as that I was in a period of change. My knee was healing from the first serious injury of my life. Before that, you don’t think anything bad can happen to your body. After that, you wince when you see people running down stairs.

We’d known each other by hello for a year, and I admired her ass once as I watched her make copies at a university copy machine. Admiration is not the quite word. As with any girl, it was the ass and what was around it that fascinated me. She was something to my eyes extraordinary. She had a boyfriend and after it ended she came one afternoon to my apartment; I was still on crutches and she told me she found this charming.

So there was the initial fuck, and all that fucking, and the living together, and the moving together, so much to write about you feel almost like not writing at all.

Christmas, I’ve moved down the coast for graduate school and now am visiting; already we’re unwinding ourselves from each other, but that’s not what it feels like. A rented cabin in a town held above the sea; we fuck on the other side of the do-not-cross-fence, the edge of the cliff, sea slugs in the long grass and everything gray, but to me it is all beautiful. She’s shivering slightly, her bared ass looks cold, and we begin to fuck. The insight I have then is the most enduring of insights: that all this is temporary, the cold and the heat and the beauty, our touching, our lives, everything will go, and you say to yourself this is not to live but to embrace mortality, fucking like that into the sunset and the girl never looks back, she just jolts forward and sinks toward you and jolts forward again; how quiet all this is; and the further epiphiny comes: it will never get better than this: you are at the top of the mountain and what is there to do now?

You could push forward. This is storybook death and since you’ll die one day anyway, since all of this will, why not? Only who will read the story and how will you know it’s been read and from your grave of water or earth, how will you value it?

It all spins away. A boy doesn’t learn until the third or fourth time that when he takes a woman for granted this is just a part of his nature he must confront, not indulge, that there is nothing wrong with the relationship, that he is destined, though, to try to find something wrong with them all. That he will miss her after all. That he does love and need her despite his fears, or whatever it is that fucks him up about this.

The break up comes long before the last fuck, but the break up is clearly final.

This last fuck in Vegas, memorable, her x over my face, my x in her mouth, this very rare moment when you are touching the beautiful thing and still knowing it as beautiful, when the beauty hasn’t been broken by the fact you’ve been allowed beside it. We’re fucking in the Mirage, or some other hotel like it, a point of meeting just for kicks or the next to last goodbyes, or whatever it is, all her beauty revealed to me, the way beauty usually is in loss, but now somehow revisited, this momentary reprieve, like the walks I take pound dogs for before they put them to sleep, if sleep is what you call death.

She was wearing white suit pants and an open throated blouse and that was a decade ago but picturing her now hurts.

There was the return trip, the Vegas to LA drive in the night, I’d brought her plumbs, her favorite fruit, and I ran them back up to her hotel room; she was not happy to see me five minutes after that heavy post fucking goodbye; and now I was on the road, ok enough, though it seemed I shouldn’t be, four hours with just me, the first time in my life I knew it might be like that in general, the first time I realized sometimes it is just the taste of her x and the feel of her as she comes that you have to go on.

And that if it is not enough, then what?

The most amazing thing about her was that her eyes are almost gold, like a lion’s. The statue, it was bronze. And don’t let Freud or me lie to you, even if by accident; there is no lost love: that vision of the perfect woman is just the desire to have the many vaguely embodied, and that resentment, it is what we feel for the one that has cut us away.

The last I heard from her she said she’d gotten old and fat, but I’d didn’t believe her and I didn’t care.

Everything aside, what I like is that though she is gone there is at my core love for her so that I can believe in the almost eternal nature of what I call real love. It might have faded for her; I’ve never known a woman, no matter how tightly she gripped, who didn’t move fully past me, but she was the first of three I’ve not fully past, and I consider it a blessing.

c and m

Though on the night I met m we fell to fucking, I considered her and m both as friends. Each has a daughter my son’s age and we went on play dates together, the little girls and my little boy, parks and swimming pools and kid eateries filled up with video games and plastic tunnels.

c, that first night, she wanted to fuck and fuck and so we did, and in the morning, I was ready for her to leave, anxious to go about my day, one I envisioned spending alone, but she wanted to fuck more and the fucking became somewhat chorelike.

Much later, not long ago, in fact, a female friend, one who has been blogged, would see c’s face accidentally captured on a home video of my son and his playmates, and this friend asked me to go back to c, to freeze, those soft eyes, that expression that made you believe she was thinking about something beautiful.

Who is she?
She looks like she belongs in a French film.
Have you fucked her?

The way some women always want to know about other women, what the connection is, how they compare, where she in the world, this vague but not impossible threat.

c was not an actress and though you could see her like that, some French girl playing herself in some sad French film, she was, in fact, a semi-pro kickboxer and her back was so muscular that fucking her from behind bordered homo eroticism.

It was that and other things. The way in the kitchen, she’d reach for my x while I was cooking the kids’ dinner and I’d have to squirm away and tell her over and over again that while my son visited, my sex was off.

What finalized it, or rather what preempted anything serious, it was that when fucking she’d push her palm against my chin with the thumb cupped up to press against one cheek and the fingers against the other, not the way a grandmother tries to force a pout out of a mouth but the way a boy usually does with a girl when they are playing games of domination and submission, pushing upward, like she was trying to force my head, my face, out of existence.

As for m, she was having marital problems, a Pilipino woman older than I, short and pretty in a flat way, she hung around with us, consistently resentful of c, a passive aggressive woman who felt to have been starved of everything, all the nutrients that make us whole, a woman who tried so badly to show you how intelligent she was that you began to realize she really wasn’t very intelligent at all.

She thought her marriage would be ok if she fucked other men for a couple of months and so she moved into a hotel not far from where I lived. There, one evening late, she sat in my lap and said, I've always thought about this, and kissed me. Then she unbuttoned her shirt and sat there bare chested, her tiny breasts poking out at me, her looking down at herself, this emotionally fragile woman as fucked up as any I’ve ever known, and when I see it now what I feel for her is sad, the moment one of complete pathos.

There was no way then to deal with it and so I remained perfectly still, my eyes downcast, saying nothing, almost not breathing, like a man who is dying, who is almost all the way out of this world.

After that she was persistently after me to fuck her.

Her child was a beautiful and almost perfectly silent girl, and I realized that she didn’t speak much because her mother was always talking. The father sounded like a good man and I wanted to help m understand that her marriage was salvageable, that she wouldn’t do better, that for the sake of the child, she should try to work it out. I suppose I could see that she was doomed either way, that kind of restless heart that will pop itself eventually, and I figured it was best for the little one to at least be in her father’s home when all that went down, and so I argued with m the way usually a woman argues with a man that maybe counseling would help, but she would hear none of it.

She was determined to fuck and I was determined we should remain friends only.

m and I, we still fucked but I tried not to very often, and she’d never push overly hard, but she’d never quit pushing, either. She’d been through the fires, done things I haven’t done, been places I’ve not been; the stories she told of what became of her after she divorced her oppressively religious husband: hardcore swinger parties, professional dungeons, double penetrations, the fire she walked through much deeper than the fires I know, and yet she was remarkably unburned, with the face and eyes soft, as if none of it had worn her out on anything

Being with either of them or sometimes both was like feeding tape worms: there was so much need, and you felt in the end they’d eat you and then what was around you and what was around that, like the Pink Panther cartoon where the vacuum cleaner swallows up everything there is until all that is left is outerspace and itself, and then it swallows the moon and stars, and then it swallows itself.

I told m finally we could fuck but only if she understood we’d never speak again, our friendship would be over, and I calculated wrong, because I assumed she valued me beyond the idea of fucking, but she said, Ok.

It happened with c, the three of us at the bars and then we went onto my big bed.

m looked small with us, and perhaps I cold have found this interesting, enticing, but given the overall context, it put my off. There was an oversoftness to her skin I found nearly repulsive, and that together with the fact that she remained completely passive, lying there letting everything happen to her, all added up to making the experience semi-grotesque.

I watched as c kneeled on the bed and licked at m’s x and it was like watching an animal drink at a pool. I couldn’t fuck her or even touch her that way, and I thought with what felt like nostalgia about all the girls’ I’d been with who’d looked alarmingly beautiful with their faces pressed to the face or between the thighs of another woman.

I thought about those times the way in our worst moments we think of childhoods to which we’ll never return, innocence lost, and this night, it was an ugly night.

When c finally stopped licking, I started to fuck her, the beginning of that long labor that we always went through, and so it was almost with relief that I saw that m had risen and begin to dress, her jaw clenched, feeling alone and sorry for herself, just the way I could have told her fucking around with me would have caused her to feel.

As the night began it might have seemed that things were coming together, but of course, this was the moment of impact and everything was going to go apart.

It wasn’t as if any of us in that room that night wasn’t getting what he or she deserved, though it might fairly be say that all of us had once been to taught to expect that from life we might get more of what we thought we needed.

X

I spend last night in a bar where once I met a girl who told me during our flirty conversation that she believed she tasted good. This was a tall girl in a sleeveless dress and her arms where that pretty color of tan that hasn’t gone too deep and so I licked her, a sort of unreasonable move more likely to annoy than to charm, but I would at least like to imagine since I can’t remember for certain that somehow the context justified the action.

What I liked best was her smile and I liked it most when she flashed it after I licked her arm. We'd gone daring together and the bond was immediate.

We went for a two am breakfast, her and me and my friend and her friend, and afterwards, she took me to her home. Her friend disapproved. Mine did not.

You couldn’t see it in the bar but she was fragile. She’d just broken up with her boyfriend, a pro football player, and she wasn’t ready for much of anything but she wanted to be. By the time we reached her house, neither of us were drunk, and so it wasn’t that, but rather it was that she was telling herself she ought to be pushing forward that caused her to take these steps with me, only they were coming too soon and too quickly.

If I met her now, last night, for example, I would let her go, the way some people do with some animal they come to realize they shouldn’t have hunted.

I was younger then and not as often capable as thinking like that.

The bar has a new name but it is the same bar; last night, I sat in the same place I’d been standing when I met her, this short length of open wood between the place the cocktail servers pick up drinks and the corner on the other side of which is the important long stretch. Everybody drinking, everything dim but the bottles, the night like any bar night, where the girls become so pretty in the liqour and the light.

(And you know you’re in trouble when you are in a bar and you can look at any girl and know what she is like naked, with her imperfections exposed to your post coital eye, her vulnerability fully bloomed, everything revealed, the real contours of her face and body, out of the glow of the bar room attention.

You know you are in trouble when you’re in a bar and there is no one you really want to fuck. You see butts instead of asses. What you feel is alone. And the last thing you can imagine wanting to do is put your tongue some girl’s exposed skin.)

The night I met her, not so many years ago, in this city to which I’ve returned, in this bar to which I’ve returned, to this very spot to which I’ve returned, in this illusion of life as a cycle instead of line that goes zipping off bottle rocket-like and eventually fizzles, that night not so many years but such a long time ago, her smile so pretty, her hair long, the little scar on her arm where they gave her an immunizations as a child, what else was there to do but try to get close?

Later, she wasn’t sure, even though she kept saying she was. She lifted her dress and as I remember it there were no panties to take off or move aside. I kissed her x. After a little while, I went inside of her, neither of us undressed, sprawled on a couch the color of which I want to recall but cannot. We fucked rather slowly and I don’t remember any real pleasure in it. I remember looking at her face and waiting for her to smile and the focus of her eyes just over my shoulder and I remember that after a little while, she seemed to try to come.

We went out to the balcony and smoked a cigarette together. I felt fond of her, the way I would with an old friend. She talked about her ex boyfriend and you could hear how she was trying to make sense of their breakup, the way we look for meaning in this chaos of relationship.

I was leaving the city in a week. The state. The country.

I would be gone.

Now I’m back. If she sat beside me, I’d recognize her in a heartbeat. Once upon a time, in my older life, I used to tell myself that I met a single girl over and over; that we had to reintroduce ourselves, but in essence, there was the soul of one Woman, a line of stones across a river, all the dots you can connect to get from one point to another, but each of them the same, those familiar places we go to rest and from which we can scan out the next leap, and sometimes, when it came to goodbyes, and even hellos, this made things easier.

I know better now, better than believing that, and better, even, than trying to make certain things like goodbyes and hellos easier. I’m sitting in the bar drinking what I always drink. The girls are all around and some of them will let you lick.

(She was standing beside me, smiling, looking over, looking away, looking over again. We began to talk. I asker her what her virtues were and she thought and she smiled and she said, I think I taste good.

And I smiled and bent toward her, and I said, I think I taste well.)

m

She was soulless and thus one was much more capable of wanting her than loving her and that made her safe to fuck. Of course, who am I to say that anybody hasn’t a soul? Or, for that matter, to imply that anybody has.

I just mean that she would never care for anyone beyond herself and it is almost impossible for me to think I’m in love with a woman like that, as intoxicating as her beauty might be.

And m, to look at her, even in pictures, even in flesh, she was quite beautiful.

In a busy night club where I was ignoring her because she demanded attention she asked me to fasten her necklace and from that little intimacy was born seduction, though to claim its authorship as my own would probably be to mistake what happened.

These are late afternoons in her crazy uncle’s expensive Mediterranean apartment, a place like a museum, the antiques polished, the recluse in a duplicate floorplan upstairs, sometimes his cane moving across the polished stone floor like a bone, my fingers in m’s x, her on all fours, dark hair thrown back on her dark skin and those eyes as light brown as butterscotch candies. She runs it hot/cold and the mystery of her sometimes surrender and sometimes refusal to surrender is still unsolved to me.

By the time it was over I had been carrying a cell phone she’d gotten me, one of those gifts people give to imprison the giftee. It was then a time of long conversation and text messages and me who had been trying to live that Spartan life feeling suddenly weighted and by a girl who save the virtue of her persistence and her beauty was not weighty. Finally one night I knocked the phone from the bed in my sleep and found with relief in the morning it was broken.

She was to a degree a liar and you often felt that she was trying to trick you, not so much because you’d only go the direction she wanted you to if she manipulated you, but because it was habitual.

My heart was hardly with her but sometimes I sat in the living room on that stiff furniture with the wind coming off the sea and lifting the curtains and her accidentally posing across from me and the two of us looking like an artist and a model, that kind of almost perfect couple, two people who demand attention, the way certain pretty girls seem to shout look at my bone structure and certain men that seem to fancy themselves artists seem to shout: read my mind, and everybody demands that everybody else know their hearts.

Hubris, of course, on all counts.

She was dating a man on the television and I passed him once shooting a segment for his show and I called her cell from her other cell and held it up so she could hear him talking and she could know I’d passed him and he was blind to me. I suppose I wanted him to seem a fool even though he represented a level of safety, the way boyfriends and husbands always make a girl feel safer to me, especially up front.

There was meanness between us, I suppose because I resented what she wanted off of me and because she resented what I wanted off her, those cross purposes. Once I told her that her beauty was an accident and that though she was in her moment of perfection she’d never hold it. You could see how it would happen, looking at her thighs as she sat across from you, or her ass as you fucked her from behind, her teeth just after she’d kissed you, you could see the potential for some small change, some series of them, and you’d know how they would ruin her, for she was perfect and real perfection can afford no movement; simply: since there is no such thing as more perfect, one can only move away from it or stand still and nobody stands still.

Often, she was cold, coming on what she thought as subtle in that old cliché way of a woman who wants you to want to marry her, and me coming across honestly in that old cliché of a man who wants to fuck. Towing the line between these cross purposes, and so she’d fall to thinking she wanted to fuck and every now in then, in that fucking, I’d feel in deep and I’d think the way we feel before the orgasm demoralizes us, that this was the stuff of life and since she’d given it to me she had something to do with near immortality, and so for a little while, less than ten minutes of any meeting between us, both m and I seemed to be getting what we wanted.

What I was doing with her beyond that, I couldn’t say, not eve now, except that we want beautiful things.

My father was a big game hunter, a taxidermist, who thought he loved the animals he killed and even that they loved him. Me, I’m a vegan, but I’d imagine you know better than to think that means I’m not some kind of killer who is always looking for ways to spiritualize his kills.

The time I best remember fucking her was a time when I thought we wouldn’t fuck at all. Tired by m’s company, I’d brought A. This was late night after a missed flight and a more than normal sense of restlessness rolling around in me. The girls refused to touch but each in her way worked on me and I was bored with the moment and resentful of them both.

Somehow or another, it happened that A and I began to fuck and m half lay back on the couch. She’d stripped down to her panties and the second or third time I looked up at her, her hand was buried in them. It seemed an unusual thing for a woman, especially this woman, to find inspiration by the sight of fucking, especially this man she wanted to consider hers. Perhaps it was that her outward beauty outshone A’s and so she felt no threat, especially as she couldn’t see how perceived from the inside, which is half of where we look, she compared unfavorably.

In any case, the way she fingered herself, focused as was on my body and A’s, how we looked fucking, made me want her and so I pulled her down onto the carpet. She was very wet, and I curled down against her as we fucked so that my head was beside her head, our ears touching. There was a real sense of connection. The moment had made her raw. It wasn’t long until I was wishing we were alone, feeling for a little while bonded, then the connection went thin, the fucking like a microcosm of our relationship, moving from that honeymoon excitement to boredom, that feeling that you’ve reached your limits. I stuck a finger in her xx almost out of a sense of desperation, the way sometimes when we know we are running out of fuel we drive faster as if somehow that will ensure we make the station.

With this she began to come.

Later, not much later, she’d be angry with me about it all. The broken phone and the fact that she’d fucked me after I’d fucked A, the way I was wandering off from her, but what I’ll remember is a time after that, when I’d just returned from a visit to the States and jetlagged, I bumped into m on the streets. I’d come back with a bad hair cut and was conscious of it sitting in that apartment in which we’d so often fucked or moved toward fucking and then turned away from it.

It felt like nostalgia and the traveling and the haircut so short I felt bald had left me vulnerable and she seemed unattained. She was warming herself up to me as she always had done, sitting across the room, then close, finally touching, and that touching would lead to a deeper touch, always my finger in her x, rarely my x in her mouth, then her sitting up with her legs spread and me kneeling to lick her x and her taking me by the chin or the side of the head to lead my mouth to hers, my x to hers.

This time, it all felt forced. In fact, it felt as it always had, only this time I saw it for what it was before it had advanced much.

In one bedroom there were her clothes spread all over the bed, the way spoiled girls seem to do, and I sat amongst the scattered blouses and skirts and panties thinking of how she might look in them. She had her shirt off to change into another and you could see half her areola soft and evenly colored above the cut of her bra and I wondered after the perfection of her body and face and I had the barely realized epiphany that nobody is really vapid, no matter what she seems, and that might have saved the moment, though it didn’t.

I’d talk to her after that, but we’d never see each other. I’d leave the country, her and other girls, and something has become of her since then, some other man’s lover, or maybe the same man, the one from the television show, or maybe she is a wife and mother, though it was only three years ago and it hard to imagine all that happening in such a short time, though much more has happened to me since.

I think about that winter evening on her bed with her clothing scattered around it. There is always the specter of what might have been, these ghost lives a moment changed by not much would have sent us into for real, the potential for something between us, the way you think of shaping somebody and she is probably thinking of shaping you, and all you really face is collision and disaster, but it was never very close: I never believed in her, not really.

Though there is the way a sunset frustrates you: what is the function of beauty? What can you do with it but try to have it. Look at my father with his rifle pointed in the direction of some wildly lovely creature in the falling snow.

On the bed was a vest of rabbit. I lifted it and felt of its fur and regardless of what she said, I knew as I held it that this is where we reallyreally stopped.

R and a

The thing to remember about her is that if I sabotaged my second marriage it began in earnest with R on the dog path, an unremarkable girl with blond hair and blue eyes, large breasts and a Boston Terrier. We met by introduction through an elderly man whose dog often played with mine; the meeting was brief and later she’d tell me she thought I was either an asshole or gay because I paid her no real attention.

What you think when you walk away from a blond girl with big breasts and blue eyes, all those b’s, when you’re walking with the dog you share with a woman who waits, what you think on this fall day on the asphalt path in the shade of apartment complex forest is that you’ve traded the one for the many.

Whatever you do, whatever you decide, you will second guess it.

Every choice is right. Every choice is wrong.

If you think you can move in a direction without regret, think again.

The woman who is waiting, she makes you happy enough. Sometimes you say to yourself: what more could I want from a girl? And if the answer isn’t really much, than it must not be more from a particular girl your looking for. Or at least that is the kind of thing I think when I pause at the top of the hill and look back at the blond haired blued eyed girl with her Boston Terrier.

This is about R, five foot five, one hundred and twenty pounds, what else is there to say? We would never fuck and wouldn’t even get together for another six months. We’d see each other on the path and chat briefly and I’d move on.

But when my marriage went bad, whether I sabotaged it or not, whether I really wanted that or not, the relief I tried to sell myself on the mornings after was that now I could began again with earnest seductions—not quick fucks justified by bad fights, but legitimate full on potential laden assignations.

R, in the immediate vicinity, she was the first girl I brought into that once shared home.

We never really dated though I bought her a Valentine’s Day gift; we would meet for drinks and we’d watch dvd’s and she slept half a night in my bed. She let me take down her shorts and she let me put my face between her thighs and she did not sop me when I began to tongue her x, but she would not let me take her shirt off. There was a tattoo on her lower back, her very lower back, the first thing she showed me that first time I meant to seduce her and I took it as the first sign that she meant to be seduced.

Her sister is two years older and looks just the same as R except that at that time she wore her hair short while R wore he hair long; naturally I’d want to fuck her, that sister thing, the way we always want to fuck the sisters and friends of our girls, but no, I never did, not R’s.

In a bar with two friends, the three of us half drunk males trying not to play our alpha male games, we bumped by accident into R and her sister and a friend. She was drunk and more warm than she was when we were alone. The sister asked to see the stomach that R had talked about and so R lifted my shirt and they all evaluated and the friend dragged her finger down the line that divides my hip from my torso. My friends stood by drinking their beers, watching R show off, and since I was being shown off, this was a moment I liked.

As far as I can remember, she, like a, a girl from pretty much the same time period, a girl whose x I only slipped a finger into once, this girl who had the sad face of Charlotte Rampling, those pale blue eyes that always looked pained, the face of a suicide waiting to happen, this girl with her two bottle of wine a night habit and a father who was dying and a vintage Mercedes she was overly attached to, this girl a, always trying to hide her expressions of mourn with wide smiles and easy laughter that only counfounded the sorrow, she, like R, as far as I can remember, never touched my x. And I’ll never be long with a woman who doesn’t at least make it seem as if she can’t help but reach for me there, as if she has or at least wants a special and almost separate relationship with my x, the way I’ll have one with hers.

They were women both of them who let things happen without doing much, hardly any sexual aggression in them, at least not much with which they were comfortable, and though you know a woman can be freed from whatever it is that freezes her, you tell yourself taking part in that kind of escape makes you responsible for the escapee, and R, so underextraordinary, and a, so damaged, I could not see myself as responsible for either.

It just faded out, in both cases, without ever having picked up much steam. R was gone before a but a was gone more sharply, and it was R, really, that day on the path, that helped to start this fresh round, a girl who I’m sure never knew her significance in that way.

I think about how immediately after the hard breakup that preceded these girls, I’d felt pain; for a few weeks, these weeks when I knew R and a few other women, a amongst them, I was telling myself that yes, this is what I traded it for, a blond or a brunette on my couch, the movie only half over, the bottle half gone, the legs half open.

Perhaps everything would have been different if I hadn’t walked my dog that day. She was wearing pink shorts, tight, and a bulky white sweatshirt, this mismatch of confidence and covering; you wanted to know her, what she was hiding, what she wasn’t, the way you want to know many girl.

And the price you paid and what you really got for it, well, those are hard things to determine.

fatigue

as way of an apology and explanation for a promise borken: a pic.
it is used with permission of the girl.
and i am as tired as i look.
the place all this restlessness gets you.