M

While you’re fucking she tells you that at the club she was taking meth and this makes you feel accidentally involved in a date rape.

This is a girl I met through an online personal site, as if that would solve a problem. As if a woman chosen that way would prove to be more suited. As if I'm looking for more suited. As if there is any woman who except for through act of will you'd choose to be alone on an island with the rest of your life.The lies we tell ourselves when we're tired.

M is is the noise you create after a bad breakup when you are afraid to be alone with your brain.

She is part of what you do when you think you mean to really really retire, move into the next phase of life, crash land on that island.

She's your first attempt.

She looked much sexier in her picture than she did in real life but she was plenty sexy, a sort of club girl who worked in a vet clinic by day but put on the makeup mask and the hothot clothing at night, a thin girl with a heartbreak story that didn’t match her sex kitten photos, lips pouted to the camera, tongue out and tip bent up along the side of some female friend’s face.

(That's right, I'm looking for the love of my life, a final final love, and that is the picture on which I stop).

It's the middle of the week. She takes me to a place in which I feel too old, an underground club where the music is hard and the kids are jumping up and down. I feel overly tall, overly worked out, a sort of giant, out of place, this mythological land that makes perfect sense to the people that inhabit it.

This girl, her friends, all of them pretty, what am I doing here? What is she doing with me?There's vodka. The walls are black, the floor strange, like particle board, chewed up in places and spongey. This is a better hell, dark and somewhat dirty, but you might choose to be here, just not for long, not for an eternity.

She's in and out of the booth, dancing, her friends, all this sort of conversation, people talking anyway, and we drink and the floor gets blacker and I was ready from when I walked in to be away.

When she asks me to stay the night, I don't know why. Both of us are looking for something we probably shouldn't believe in. Both of us are probably going about it all wrong. She asks me to her bed maybe because she thinks that is how it starts, if it is to start at all. And when it comes down to it, I suppose she is right.

I've alreayd had my ephinany, though. It's not going to work. Not like this. I think I've learned my lessons well and am ready to settle, like anybody who walks out of a building that has burned. I know the value of what I might have again and so I mean to get it quickly and take care of it well, but I'm with this girl because of her picture, and that's not going to cut it.

My realization some time in the club, or mabye in the car on the way to or from it: I'm not going to find HER, whoever she is, if she even is, this way, or that way.

That fine line. On one side, you're a monk. On the other, you are 81vaginas. It's not that you ever cross it. It's just that it can be crossed.

She is sucking my x and I am pulling down the boxer shorts with the elastic band rolled several times to make them snug, and I am wondering vaguely who they belonged to. She's got little plastic packages full of lubricant she squeezes out into her x, telling me that some medication she is on makes her dry. That and the ceiling fan.

It's late. The next time I see her--I return for a jacket that I'll leave by accdient in the morning--we watch cartoons and she eats Capitan Crunch without milk and I feel like the stranger I am, sitting on her couch, wondering how much time has to pass before I can take my jacket and go this time for good.

Anyway, we fucked. I think there is some affection in it, and certainly some pleasure. There are moment, as with any fuck, when you sense that connection you're after. Her eyes fall into yours. Or she kisses you more delicately. My hand is flat on the front side of her hip, the tips of some fingers on her sunken belly, her life right beneath them, all the working mechanics of a full on human being, complete, if you look up--and I do, I always do--with soul and whatever that entails.

And I know what I'm doing. I know it for real. I'm trying to get the feeling of some girl that is gone off of me. The thought of her out of my mind. The way sometimes we try to clean things not with water, not with purity, but with other kinds of stain. You rub dirt over your bloody hands.

And nothing really gets your mind free. This would take a lobotomy, a pill, a bullet.

I'm looking for the love I never fully had, a cave in which to hibernate, a grave in which to rest, but I stop on the sexiest photo I can find. I fuck her more than anything to take possession of her particular appeal, as if after that it will always belong a little bit to me, the way a woman picks a flower so she can annex its beauty to her own.

She tells me she took meth at the club. I'm fucking her. Her ass is small and round and pale. There is a little operation scar on her belly. She told me about before we met. She's got this story of loss, some boy she couldn't see that she should have kept and now she is digging around in the dark for one like him.

In the morning, at the stop light close to my apartment, dawn really, after the night of fucking, I fall asleep sitting in my car, I don't know for how long. I just wake and the light is green and I wonder where I am, and who.

e

That kind of Irish that is black haired. The eyes blue and deep set, the skin pale. You look at her the first time and tell yourself stories that all pretty much end the same way: if you touch her, your life will change.

Rainbows move away so that you never can prove they don’t end in pots of gold, but everybody breaks down up close. The question is not how many lovers you’ve had but why you’ve had them. The question is whether or not the serial fucker is less culpable than the man who is reputedly trying to run down an illusion.

And as for you, you’ve only loved women you fucked—before that, you are capable merely of want—and this is enough to make you believe that you don’t really know how you feel about a woman until after the fucking.

And as for e, we’re fucking in a nearly empty apartment, a place into which I’m about to fully move, as if my life in this new place will be better than my life in the place I’m leaving. There are only a few boxes and the carpet is new and we don’t turn on any lights, such is our guilt, or perhaps our sense of the fragility of the long moment. e is on the floor with her knees by her shoulders.

She is her face; it is extraordinary. She’s been staring at me, frank and curious. From the distance of her admiration, she is the one. Picture her smiling at a Bed Breakfast early morning table. Imagine her in the seat beside you as you drive through some night. She’s cultivating the lines on your face, listening to the ways you nightmare, laughing out loud when you do something silly. She’s holding the hand of your son. She will mourn you when you die. She’s been watching me, and I see her, and I know what she means by it, and all of this is possible.

Up close, when you know her, she’s a mess. She drinks too much, has her second DUI, there are problems with her parents, there have been problems with her men, she is headed for some kind of crash, a series of them.

By the time we meet with intention, I look at her and get a general sense of disaster. The idea of a slow path of destruction.

Before the fucking, I cannot know the love that is broader than want, but that a woman and I don’t have that potential for love, of that I can sometimes feel certain, sometimes even before the first kiss. I look at her and see liability.

This habit of seduction that outlasts the potential on which seduction aught be based.

There are checker boards and checkers, and we play. (You tell yourself, if you sit back and let her come at you, you’re not responsible). Later, we stand in a grocery store, a loaf of bread, a jar of almonds, a post drink late night picnic.

She’s very lovely, nude on the floor of the apartment that will be mine but at the time feels like what it is: an empty and strange place that I will have to learn to inhabit. She’s flexible, little, her breasts are quaking mounds, and she never in that near dark seems to close her eyes. She tells you with them the first time she looks at you that she wants to fuck you, or maybe it is a more general want and this is just where it leads, but now, what her stare means, you don’t know with certainty. In retrospect, it is as if she is trying to make you aware that she is fully conscious, that she knows who she is, who you are, what you are doing, that she wants you to see her seeing you.

Her blue eyes no color at all in the shadow, just open and with the white around them, and her mouth, her pretty lips, later she’ll put them around your x, and later yet, she’ll say about it, I never go down on a guy.

(Later: drunk phone calls, night after night, accusations, declarations, promises, pleading).

She’s brought me a framed picture, something she bought in Czechoslovakia. We’ve been fucking, on the floor, and then with her leaning on the bar, her ass overly thin and disappointing, insubstantial, her face forward, eyes maybe open then too, black hair falling across her pale shoulder blades. While she dresses, I hang the picture, close to where we’ve been.

I like her voice. She is smart and sometimes she talks about things and in such a way that makes even my brain go quiet and reallyreally listen. But you get close and you see the cracks, the problems, the liabilities. There is, after it all, a sense of doom to her, an easy prophecy of a sort of chunk by chunk loss of her, from this world into the next, or into a simple darkness, a beauty that will be broken down, that is on that path all ready. What she is really looking for, staring at, who knows? A savior. A witness. A second opinion.

x, J, (T, A )

The thought process starts almost right now, on this napkin in a bar on this night that is not quite the present.

It goes first to x. Call it a blind date, though that description is not precise. Call her a reporter, though she was not a reporter any longer. She was a good postmodern media mix: Polynesian/Anglo, tall and well breasted, with what we’d call no accent though everybody who doesn’t talk like you has an accent; she called herself a gym rat—there was something unattractive about the phrase—and her sense of humor was sophomoric; her beauty was just a little off so it is fitting to imagine her a broadcasting rather than being broadcast about.

(There was another reporter. This in a foreign country, and there she is well known. Imagine a sharply dressed woman, petite, with perfect hair, a woman who had come to the States, to Atlanta, for her broadcast training; you can see the Mediterranean in her, a pretty but not beautiful woman. Imagine that to walk with her is to have her name shouted out over and over, right past your face, right through you, TM¸ TM! The way people want to be recognized by the recognized. We fucked only briefly and not very deeply, her x so narrow, so shallow, it felt more like a point of victimization than a pleasure, this in the apartment of a a, a friend, if you can call him a friend [we went one Halloween as Caesar and Brutus, me all bloody, and later A would remark of that particular a that the costumes were apropos (a colleague, he’d try to betray me professionally), and I’d tell her not to worry, that that a is one of those men who only wants to be a bully, that however he tried to fuck with me, it was ineffectual; one of those men who resent the power they perceive in other men the way some women resent the beauty they see in their friends, he couldn’t really do me damage—but A was kind to want to notice, this lovely girl with her deep set eyes and that caricature of a stripper’s body, A and I, twelve hours before my flight taking me forever away, we were finally coming clean, and A was pressing and I was pressing, me to her, saying it was meant to be, asking my fingers into her body, though it was daylight and we were outside, Syrian workers leaning into the fence, trying to see what they could, those last desperate hours, there were so many to so goodbye to say that I did not properly say goodbye to much of anyone, and to one I did not say goodbye for real, this haunting girl r who would sometime later follow me to the States and reek all havoc (she would dance under Karma and you know I deserved it) but A, this lovely girl, her tongue (how strange a thing, I’d seen it touching her teeth, seen her mouth, seen her body, for months, thought about it vaguely, and now it was upon me) in my mouth (and how strange it feels to kiss and touch when you reallyreally know that it can go no further, not this day and not tomorrow and, speaking practically, not ever), six months of preamble, of foreplay, you always wonder, or you always should: is this real? Am I here and is it now? this girl in the Mediterranean sun, her flesh damp, her shirt open, and the flight on which you’ll leave now en route to touching down and waiting and we lean against the coarse building wall, there are palm trees and there is the sea and this is a goodbye and if you see it as I do this is like a scene from a love film, though there is no real love, only real longing] and T, that reporter, and me in the apartment of a, a friend that had yet to openly and ineffectively tried to betray me but knew he would, the way all people’s motives and where they’ll lead are known to them if they dig hard enough, A she’s kneeling on the bed, her x too tight, so my x in her mouth, and I think of her moving with me from trendy club to trendy club, where for us there is never an entrance fee, where we never pay for drinks, and I am not her accessory, she really likes me, and in this crowd of youth there is nothing to hide, but in this country of tradition all affairs are dangerous, and my apartment, we cannot go there, so here we are in the bed of a friend, he’ll find the condom wrapper later, and maybe his hate will be born for me then; quite late, I walk her out, past the guard gate to her Range Rover, she is more sure of herself than pretty, she has the ears of half the people, strange power, but I’m with her not because of it but because she is terribly interesting and her breasts stand out sharply from her little body; those nights we walked from club to club, the stain of wine on her breath, and it goes on and on and it goes off.)

And I know who I am. I’ve had the luxury of too many choices; I am a spoiled man. I’m scribbling on a napkin at a bar, making an outline, as if it is more interesting to write about fucking than it is to fuck.

Vodka tonics, and some people say they drink to forget, but sometimes I say I drink to better remember. This bar to I go out of habit; wherever I live, there is such a bar, not far away, familiar, and I feel safe there and most of the time sure. This one is populated primarily by divorcees, or at least women that feel like it, thirty and beyond, for the most part. And here, I stand out. The middle aged men with their bellies pushing against their expensive shirts. Boys show up, but they are too clearly boys in this atmosphere. And I get to straddle the line. I get to appear all grown up but not all grown out; there will be two or three like me in here in a night. And there will be some standout girls. In the club next door, I would fade quickly, though they wouldn’t.

There is nothing here that interests me. Or next door either. Maybe much of anywhere.

I think primarily of the second reporter, that not quite blind date, a place called the Dark Horse, we got very drunk. I was nervous at first, and she never has been.

In the crowd, in that good light, she was aggressive. Kiss me, she said. And I did. There was some game she was playing, trying I think to bowl me over, whatever power that would give me, and I was trying to go almost stride for stride, like a man in the wrong kind of match but trying to fit anyway.

She pushed her hand beneath my beltline. I don’t know what she was trying to prove against me but I am certain this had little if anything to do with attraction. I am not erect or close. All around us are people but I don’t imagine that she’s doing it for there benefit. I don’t imagine she’s doing it for mine.

She tells me to touch her in the same way. I do it, the x completely shaved and only slightly wet, and for whose benefit I touched it I can’t say for certain

There is another girl in the bar, J, my leasing agent, a woman I’d made out with in a different bar a week before, and then, sober, the next day, she’d told me, as I fantasized about how she’d spend her lunch breaks romping with me in my apartment, she told me she was too young for me, which was, of course, another way of saying I was too old for her.

It had never occurred to me that there was such a thing as a woman for whom I was too old. Now it did. Now it does.

Call it a meridian. There is the you that you are before you consider that you’ve actually moved too far away from the next generation to touch it, and there is the you that become when you realize you have. You can trace the lines on my face with the tips of your finger, but I’d never done that before J.

So she’s in the bar, and she’s said hello, and I don’t know what all of this she’s seen. I stand there with my x feeling very limp in small in x’s unfriendly grip and with my hand hanging dead in her pantyless jeans, and I think about J, about her x; I think that I will get close to it, the way I think of it now as well: one untouched x amongst the billions of untouched x’s, some small fraction of the overwhelmingly large group that you will never ever known.

The reporter, x, I walked her to car. We kissed there. In private, she was less aggressive. I knew not to push it. She was going to call me when she got home. She did not. She did not return my call the next day. I let it go. You picture things as butterflies in your hands and you just unfold your fingers.

The first reporter, the people in the streets, she took me from club to club, this little version of fame.

I’m scribbling about them on napkins. There is nothing here that I want, and that is a particularly damning type of frustration, not wanting anything.

My father used to mark the milk carton so I would not drink more than I had been allotted. I remember how it was when I first left the house and had money, and I could walk in the grocery store and buy whatever I wanted. I marvel at it sometimes still, despite all the restrictions I’ve put on myself, not unlike my father’s restrictions, the way it feels to know that anything you want is yours if you choose to take it. I walk the aisles and I could have this or that and all and more and it doesn’t mean as much to me as once it might have.

If I let them put ice in my drinks, I’d crack it with my teeth.

And there is a moment, a blond woman, I’ve seen her before and felt no real attraction, but then she was still and now she is dancing with not grace but abandon, and whatever you call it, she can move in a way not many women can move, and we want many rare things. My glass, it may as well be filled with arsenic and I’d drink it just hard—I’ll never have this woman, and when I do, she will not be enough.

(Most blogs like this end in death of self, depending on what you mean by end, and depending on what you mean by death of self.)

The men, they sit with their sucked in bellies still over their belts, their drinks in arms cocked and forced toward flex, or the skinny boys who look around faux tough, and I stand here, alone as alone as alone as alone. But I know my destiny. I know about the death of us all; I believe in it.

And I know there will be a girl first. In my bed. In my space. In my life for real. All of that again. And I know her name, or so I think. I’m aware of my path, where I’m going, and how I got here, too. I’m standing in bar not really wanting anyone that it seems I might be able to have.

So it seems as if everything is worked out in my mind, but it’s not—I know too that I will have to work hard to not resent the woman who will inevitably grow to represent the conception of death of all other choice, even if it is not choice I think I need.

The peace I can find from walking out of the bar, the peace in fact I feel in so doing, will not always be with me.

And you—youyou—the real you—you’ll be here. You’ll know what it is like, how it feels when you sort of hate who you’ll be more than you sort of hate who you’ve been.

j

You can hardly count it, but under what criteria does one count? and only the simple writer, and only the simple reader, thinks it is about counting.

This is a Montana blizzard of my youth, which lasted as long I suppose as the youths of most men these days, which lasts perhaps even into the now.

She was quite a bit older than I was, twice as grown up, and where we always found ourselves was hovering in the doorway of her fifth floor apartment in a big brick building near the university. We’d hug and sometimes she’d hold and if you were still enough you could feel her gently kissing your neck but I hardly ever felt still at those times.

I was afraid of her. I suppose that fear was based on some subconscious wisdom, some instinct. I wanted badly to be in her, but at some level I must have also known I’d be in over my head.

This was a beautiful woman, athletic, smart. There was a picture, the only one I had of her, standing on a tennis court. You could see her stomach, the slight ripple of muscle there. It was the only time I tried to show a girl off to my father, putting that picture down in front of him, but his response was non-committal.

And she wasn’t my girl. In fact, she was some other man’s.

Maybe that’s why I didn’t get it, at least not right away. The door was open, but she wasn’t going to stand there with it in her hand forever. By the time I came around, it was too late. I tell that to women now, when they don’t move forward at the right time and then later want whatever kind of bonding might have been available; I say, Our time has passed.

I knew her best through the winter and it wasn’t until spring until I tried to act but by then the moment was gone. There was a night at a house of which she was taking care; we watched a film and she put her legs, bare, in my lap, and I sat very still. It was snowing. I can’t remember the movie. I don’t think we finished. Somehow we ended up dancing, holding each other and moving our feet and whispering as if we weren’t alone though we were. The house belonged to a screenwriter, a man who had just been paid a lot. What I remember of it best is his collection of laser discs, at a time when I’d not known they exist.

We danced in some room I can’t picture. I was telling her about my prom. I don’t know why. I suppose because I didn’t know what to say. There were her lips on my neck again, just a kiss, the way once a straight male friend kissed my neck when he was going to travel to Australia and be gone for a year, leaving me to guard over his girlfriend—which I did, whom I did not touch—the kind of kiss that can be just an expression of some kind of affection.

We went to our separate bedrooms. Mine was upstairs.

Later, in the spring, when we were past hope (there was never real hope for anything real between us; I was simply under-prepared), she said, I kept waiting for you to come down.

And I told her, I kept waiting for you to come up.

I remember that long night. The ceiling, the tightness in my neck, the snow outside the window.

In the beginning, I never really went into her apartment. Those early nights of winter. The steps went down the outside of the building, and I run away from her and down them, my feet loud against the steel, and I’d run off across the field of snow to my own place, trying to understand what was going on, or maybe trying not to. Wanting to be breathless and tired.

Later, she gave me a book, The Unbearable Lightness of Being. I still have it. In the front cover, she has written: I simply want to give you something I love.

We would lie on her couch and I would read it out loud to her.

She is sick, maybe fevered, and the winter won’t wane, and I still don’t know if she wants this or not, but I move my hand up her bare leg. Maybe my hand moves itself. I keep reading and move my fingers beneath her shorts. A blanket is covering us. We’re still. In an impossibly brief amount of time, I’m touching her x. I’ve felt others, but none like this, perhaps because the others I could conceive of; this one, hers, it is the truly unknown, and yet I am in the process of beginning to know it.

I am not ready.

She moans and her weight relaxes completely into me.

I keep reading, and I move my hand away, back down her leg.

With most things, it is forward or backward. There is rarely such a state between two people as absolute stagnation. My fingers do not go inside. They go back down her leg.

Later, I’d dwell on it. I’d tell my friend, D, that I wish I’d had the courage. That if I’d slept with j, there would at least be something solid to hold onto, a rock in my memory—I’ve always been afraid of what I’ll lose in forgetting—but it has turned out not to be true. I remember her, those January evenings, the falling snow, the way she felt, what little I felt of her, I remember it, enough of it, I do.

X

We were always trying to get next to an x.

Halloween reminds me of what a child I am, or want to be. I play “The Monster Mash” for my son, and I time trip back into one of those school parties, plastic capes and rubber masks, cotton spiderwebs and cutout skeletons with brads for joints, and candy everywhere. They play the tape of the beating heart, the screaming woman, the hissing cat.

It’s needing more from the world that causes you to grow. Lack of innocence is expansion of want. And one day, you’ll recognize all the black holes into which everything falls.

That’s me, fifteen or sixteen, out in the cold, with a balloon and my memory from grade school of how to make piñatas with glue and newspaper strips. I want to be the Mordred, in his gold, the wicked son of Arthur and his tricky sister, the creepy-cool knight-killer boy from the movie.

I don’t know if it will work and my fingers are going numb, slathering strips of wet newspaper on the balloon. Shaping a mask. Strips ribboned up for curls. Gold spray paint.

The Halloween party is in the city, and what we hope for, the five of us jammed into a car, is that there will be plenty of girls there. What we think we want to do is fuck but none of us could arrange that even if a girl was willing. We’re just driven to get close; we just move recklessly in the direction of any x we can.

And none of us think about why. We’re kids. We think about how. And we don’t even think about that well. We’re bundles of wish, of prayer, of hope. The accident that will get us laid may be coming.

I’ve read Tropic of Cancer and Portnoy’s Complaint but I don’t get any of it. I don’t understand that our desire to try to fuck is something to contemplate.

The girl, she’s dressed like a genie, complete with that flap of fabric that covers her mouth and the tip of her nose. Like that and in the dark and the music, I think she’s pretty. My mask is the opposite of hers: only my mouth is visible. I’ve heard about the Ancient theory that people fall to earth as hermaphrodites and break apart and then go forever seeking out the other half, but it doesn’t cross my mind as I notice that our masks complete each other.

Outside, pressed against her in the light of the street lamp, I see her skin is bad.

And yet there is her midriff, a belly button with a jewel in it. Her genie pants are pink and billowed and gossamer. We kiss and I touch and her skin is slightly wet and she doesn’t taste very good but everything I need or want to need is before me. I could pretend I remember it now, and I could write out that false memory, but it’s lost for me as it most likely has for you: the feeling of the possibility of communing with something that you think will really fulfill you.

If you read this blog, if you’ve lived this life, you probably know there is no such thing. Peace is a different endeavor.

This is the second vagina, and all I expect is to get my fingers in. Anything beyond would overwhelm me.

I slide my hand down and she lets it go.

( I think now of the birth of my son and the death of a love and the few other very deep moments when we realize we are really right up against it, the pure stuff of life, and I’m sure those first few times, those first few touches of that which it was hard to believe we’d ever be allowed to touch, can count amongst them).

The mound, bristly. The skin soft.

My finger inside. And aside from the fact that it is warm, there is no real tactile pleasure in this. This isn’t why we touch vaginas. It’s not even why we fuck them. Our own hands are better from a purely physical standpoint.

It’s that she’ll let you. Her x is something into which many boys want to put their fingers, but on this Halloween, you’ve somehow risen from the pack of them.

(Since then, it’s never enough. You always want more, whatever you get, whatever she gives. She’s nude for you, she’s open for you, she is yours, and then what? But I’m fifteen or sixteen, and I stand there in the cold autumn air with my finger in that warm wet place, and I don’t want anything more.)

Inside again, the dim lights, the loud music, all these costumes. She has on that thing that covers her face. I leave off my mask. My friends, they’re waiting for me, but I feel separated, and I don’t tell them about any of it right away.

L

I’m thinking of chocolate covered almonds. The chocolate is dark, dairy free. There is a candy shell, yellow or purple or red. As I drive she pops one and then the other into her mouth. I learned from my mother when I was young to fear a woman who eats.

I gave up those candies, all candies, as I’ve given up other things, as, if I lived long enough, I’d give up nearly everything.

And of course, death makes spartans of us all.

But for now, it is the sugar rush of candy. (And for a long time, it’s been meat, dairy).

L is pneumatic and blond. We meet at a bar, twice, in fact. She’s smiling and open eyed and lovely and each of the times I come across her I think about her for a while after she’s gone.

She tells me she has a child but the bartender tells me she has two and over the phone she tells me that truth before I ask her for it. We play pool in the middle of the week, though I am not the sort that plays pool. She is the kind of girl you trust enough right away to do things with that you would not normally do. If she asked me to dance, I might.

The pool hall is nearly empty, but I know the boys there watch her. She’s an open invitation in front of a mostly closed door. You’ll mistake her kindness and her bubbly nature for an easiness that isn’t really there.

She drinks a lot. There’s that and the candy almonds. There are things that people don’t hide up front that wouldn’t bother you later on but are too much too early.

He breasts are round and firm, her ass small and curved, but she will not show her stomach. Maybe something has happened to it in birthing. She wants to be fucked exclusively from behind, with her shirt not off, just down around her waist.

Her oldest is thirteen and she is only 27. She calls him several times in the night to postpone her coming home and finally cancels it all together. We finish and she turns to kiss me and we stop and then a little while later, we start again.

In the morning we wake and she showers and dresses but then we start again. She asks me to come in her mouth and I do. Then I see a drip of it on her blouse, a flower print without shoulders, a deeply cut neck.

She’s got to go home, to her boy, the babysitter, and the younger one, the babysat.

She talks of a gift for seeing into people and into the future and she is so serious and so certain and tells me stories that are so convincing I began to ask her about me, about my future, and she tells me that everything will be ok. I suppose she knows that at this time not everything is.

You can almost take a hold of her. You can almost want to. It is almost always this way with a woman. You reach a point where you might go forward or might go back, where everything is tangible, and the smallest thing can move you in either direction.

I feel guilty in the car as she eats the chocolate covered almonds. She’s going home to her sons and there on her flower print shirt is the darkened fabric where my come dripped. And I have a son. And an ex wife who is his mother.

And it’s not at that moment or this one that I feel L has been misused. It is that in this effort for connection, in this testing of bonds, we all are. Where there is need or want there is danger. We introduce ourselves to disappointment, time and time again. We create illusion and crash ourselves against it.

L understand me. She says, You’ll be all right. Someday, you’ll be ready to really share your space again.

I imagine her waking in the night and me stiff beside her and curled away, and maybe it is true, or maybe she just knew some other way. It is nice to be known and nicer yet to be known and accepted.

I think of L and chocolate covered almonds and the sun on her face and the way she smiled when she got out of her car. It’s a fondness I feel and a fondness I see, and the car door closes and because this is a post, that sounds like an end, and to the fucking, it was, but to the knowing it wasn’t.

E

I haven’t thought of these slacks for years, but they were the best I ever had. Charcoal gray, Dockers, I think, and a perfect fit. The night I met E, she was wearing red slacks. First, I met her boyfriend, a bartender. I can’t remember what he was wearing. He was doing tricks with match sticks on the bar, one of the best looking men I’ve known. Let me keep my build and brain and give me that face and I’d rule the world. Well, not all of it, but a lot more of it than I do now.

The slacks eventually just wore out. You put them one day and you know, however fond of them you are, this is the last time.

The girl, E, was pretty, with a sort of Icelandic look, but in fact she was Belgium. It would take us several weeks to get to fucking but I knew she was up to it within the first few minutes. I rarely feel a girl is coming on but with her it was clear. R, her good looking boyfriend, would wander away to do his job and she and I would sit there and drink and chat.

Eventually, he’d play American football with me and a team another ex-pat and I had formed. Like most of the young men in this particular country, he’d been spoiled to the point of hubris by parents who had survived war, and though he was handsome and strong and young, he had no realistic idea of the size of the world or his own scope in it.

I liked her accent. Her hair looked brittle and she had a sad mouth and was one of those girls whose waist really sinks in, so even though her hips weren’t large, she was an hourglass, her breasts pert, her belly button sunken.

You want things to be permanent. Sometimes, if I’m buying something that I really like, I have started to mourn its eventual loss even before I’ve gotten it out of the store. Sometimes, for this reason, I buy two. What you have to know, though, is that it’s not just the wearing out that makes our relationships to things ephemeral. It’s that we change. We can remember who we were and how we used to feel about things, but we can’t be that person again.

Perhaps it is that way with people. I think of the very old couples, the twenty five year anniversaries, the thirtieth. Some of those relationships are there after all that time for good reasons. I know that.

There was no sense of potential or desire for permanence with E. (I want to give you the rest of the letters because I really like her name.) We were in a place where about half of us were from out of the country, even those whose blood lines went back to it. Almost everybody was peeling away, and though this was a large city, you felt about those people who seemed to be bound there the sort of sorrow and envy we feel here for our friends that stay in the little towns we leave.

This was only five years ago but I’ve lost much of it, how we worked toward the night of fucking. How we arranged to go drinking alone, the taxi-service to my apartment, the guard gates and across the lot (were we hand in hand?), the elevator ride up. The apartment with its balcony hanging over the Mediterranean.

I’m certain that E and I kissed the first time on the rug on the stone floor. A lot of things start on throw rugs. This one was Egyptian. I can see her on it, simply nude.

The fucking was on the couch. It went on for some time and eventually I pressed my finger her xx and then into it, the way we do further along in a love affair, when our tape worm lusts keep crying out for more and different

I probably knew I was in trouble before then. I probably knew that there was no ending point. That you just go on and on, and when they tell you that it’s the journey not the end, this is what they meant.

Pellynor and his Questing Beast.

I left that country. I remember the last days, the packing, the paperwork. All these affairs to wrap up. The slacks, I knew it was time to leave them. I’d like to think I'd like them now, and they’d fit, but it wouldn’t be the same. The promises we make when we are young are promises the people we become can not always keep.

A

I’d not choose her on my own. She says she’s never done anything like this before and by her fast chatter we can tell that she is excited in that nervous way. It is also apparent she has taken for granted we will undress with her.

She’s returned from a stint in China and talks about the ying and the yang, only she pronounces them differently than you probably do. Almost everything she says is metaphysical, and if sometimes she didn’t slow down against a question to rethink what she’d said then her conversation would be annoying.

But one gets from her a sense of sincerity and absolute openness that makes a conversation I’d normally not find bearable actually enjoyable. It is as if she is figuring herself out even in the context of the conversation, and a simple remark from either of us can turn her pensive. She’s thinking, having her little eureka moments, and coming at us with them.

After an hour, she declares that she knows this will be good for her, the conversation, meeting K and I this second time, what she imagines we’ll do together.

I’m not sure how I feel about it. And it’s hard to tell with K, who must be a little bored, who is smiling but somewhat stiffly.

We’re sitting in a bar, though not the same bar where we’ve met. This night, we’ve come together not by accident but with purpose. A has something very specific in mind. She tells us she wants to perform oral sex on me while I perform oral sex on K. She smiles and shivers and turns her head when she says this; it is childlike and endearing and though it is quite sexual her manner makes it feel like anything but.

She talks about the phallus. She talks about mine. She talks about size and angle.

I can’t tell what K thinks. We could go on and on like this, not making a decision because nobody wants to say out loud that a decision must be made. It’s like talking about the price when you want to buy something from a friend. There seems no good way to get to the heart of it.

Finally, I just say that K and I should talk for a moment privately.

……………………………………………………………………………………………..

A smokes on the balcony and K and I undress, and then start, on the floor in the living room. The entire wall is window and the blinds are half pulled across it; A comes to the glass and watches through it.

At times like these, you try not to be conscious of being watched. You think about your favorite kind of pornography, the amateurs when the couples aren’t professionals trying to put on a show. Still, there is a girl behind the glass, and how can either of us not be mostly aware?

Then she is inside, circling around us, getting on her hands and knees, pressing her face to the floor so she can look from this angle or that angle, pushing my hand aside, moving K’s hair, so frankly curious that I have to stifle a giggle.

As if we’re dealing with a scientist or an alien, intent on the study of the mechanics. She has not event taken her glasses.

Eventually, her hand is on my thigh, then around my x as it goes in and out of K’s x. This is a singular pleasure, one I’ve not experienced before in other threesomes, the grip and then the other grip, K’s wetness working between A’s palm and my x.

A kisses me, finally, on the mouth. There is the taste of her cigarette. I kneel between K’s legs and work on her x with my tongue, and A puts her face right next to mine. Then, as she said she would, she goes down on me, holding my x in her hand and taking the tip of it in and out of her mouth, a strange sort of head that is better witnessed than it is felt, and so K and I watch A and my x for awhile.

She’s not bisexual, she’s told us. But when K takes my x into her mouth, A kneels between her legs and kisses for a very long time. Now I play observer, getting close in that semi-dark so I can watch her tongue dart in and out. She pulls on the back of my head so that I join her and it is hard to tell flesh from flesh down there, what I’m licking, so I close my eyes and open my mouth and for a little while, forget myself completely.

When we touch her, she shies away. She has not undressed. We switch around several times. Always she has her mouth pressed to one of our x’s or the other, and at least once, she kisses K’s x while I fuck it. As for A’s x, I’m curiously un-fascinated with the idea of it.

She is a Russian girl with something of accent, slim and with a broad smile, eyes that go away when she smiles, hair she should take better care of. She’s charming in her way and slightly demanding and the whole thing probably for all of us becomes a bit boring.

Then K’s hand is up A’s shirt. Then the shirt is up and the breasts are out. It’s been a year since she’s has had any kind of sexual contact. She pushes each of our heads to a nipple and she tells us precisely how she wants to be kissed, and when we do, she squirms, the way she did in the bar when we talked about the prospect of the evening, and moans, and it feels as if she could come with this alone, though she does not come.

Eventually, we must stop. But who brings that up?

It is awkward to get into a situation like this, and it is awkward to get out. It’s late, I finally say. Nobody is really sated but nobody will be. K has come a few times, but those are mild orgasms that build one on top of the other to something grand, and it will take full on and focused penetration for that, and the room with three bodies tangling and untangling is too busy for that.

So we go down with her in the elevator, and this is the brightest light in the rawest moment that she’s been exposed to us or us to her, and in truth, I try not to look. I don’t want to know. She’s shy by her car, quick to get in, quick to pull out, fast down the road.

Afterwards, that night and now, I have no sense of ambivalence; it is not a bad memory, and, in fact, has a certain pleasantness to it. It’s just that I’ve never quite understood it. I still don’t know exactly what to make of it. I wonder what she got and what she didn’t and just plain why it was.

X

I’m 12 or 13 and an older neighbor tells me a friend of hers needs a babysitter for her little boy. The girls are going into the city. They pick me up and the friend is blond and wears a pair of jeans with a zipper that goes from the front of the pants, around the crotch, and up the back. I’ve never seen pants like those, before or since. When the girls pick me up, my father looks at the zipper and looks at me and looks at the zipper again.

In the car, the girl puts on prank glasses that give her huge, false eyes and turns and looks at me and laughs. I try to laugh too. When she takes the glasses off, she’s almost pretty.

Hers is a trailer house and the little boy is three or four. He eats fish sticks and I put him to bed.

Then I am alone in her trailer. I sit on her bed for a little while and then I go around and open her drawers. I look for a long time at her underwear. I think about those jeans, that zipper, and those stupid glasses. I’m trying to figure out if I’m attracted to her and my first guess would be no but I’m alone in her trailer and there is a power in this I’ve never really known and I’m 12 or 13 so eventually I get attracted to just about anything.

To keep the trailer warm at night, she’s told me, she leaves the oven on and the door open.

In the bathroom there is a wicker hamper and I dig through it until I find a pair of underwear. Everything smells slightly stale. The panties are white and there are dark reddish smears in it. These I hold to my nose and the odor is staler yet.

This is not the birth of my ability to feel both repulsed and attracted. It is just the first time I consider it.

I can’t decide if I want the panties because they’ve been up against some girl’s x, or if I don’t want them because they are stained, or if maybe why I want them more is because of the stain. I am in and out of the bathroom a few times before I decide to lock the door and masturbate with the panties close to my face.

Afterwards, I know I don’t want them. I put them back in the hamper. I go out and watch the little television. After ten or fifteen minutes, I’m thinking about the panties again. It doesn’t take long before I’m thinking about the singular pleasure of masturbating to them again. I go and get them and bring them out to the little living space. Just as I’m about to masturbate again, the little boy comes out of his room. He’s gotten cold and he leans over the open over door, warming his hands.

I watch him, his mother’s panties in my hands behind my back, his mother out with her zipper jeans, her zany glasses.

The boy goes back to bed.

I masturbate three or four more times. Between the second and the third, I don’t even bother taking the panties back to the hamper; I know no matter what I’m going to keep them. Eventually, the girls come back. My neighbor drives me home.

I never see the girl in the trailer again. She doesn’t pay me for my babysitting that night or the next day as promised, and my father gets mad. I lie and say that she brought money to school for me. I’m afraid that she knows I’ve got her panties and so I don’t want my father to make a fuss.

I keep them for a long time, years, even. Where they are now, or where she is, or the boy, who would be at this moment about what we’d call grown up, I don’t know.