Moments in which Nothing Happened

Returning from Florida, here in my old home for a few days before return to the city. And I have stories of denial and rejection from the past seven days.

Myra: I went to visit her, knowing her beau was out of the country. It was the evening and I stopped by on my bike. She looked out through the screen window when I rang the doorbell and couldn't see who it was, although it seemed like our eyes connected for a second or two before she asked who it was. Then she let me in and we sat on that couch together, separated by a foot, perhaps, their dog, and a newly-found resistance on her part.

Myra's skin is fair and her hair is blond, she has blue eyes. We spoke, exchanging basic small talk for a while. She was making stuffed animals for some novelty shop owner, I can only assume, in the city. Bears with their heads cut off. I left shortly because the atmosphere was so anodyne. And I couldn't tell if she wanted me to leave. Although she told me to stop by again sometime. I went to the bar and then received a message from her saying, that was a bad idea, that I'd freaked her out, that I shouldn't stop by. So after the bar I rode back over to the bar. We sat for a few moments on the stoop. My back to her. Nothing could come of this. We wouldn't be forgiven this time.

Blythe: my mind works methodically. Since Myra would not sleep with me, I knew not what to do. At least at first. Then yesterday when I was masturbating, the thought of lovely Jewish ex-girlfriend, so well endowed in all of the best ways, Blythe. We texted, planned to get together tonight.

We have a ritual. We spend hours talking about sex with each other. A little about the sex we've had with each other. But more about her sex life. Who she has been sleeping with. I have found vicarious accounts of her sexlife arousing since I first met her and she told me about being fucked one night by her boyfriend and his friend. Last night it was about the new guy she's been hanging out with. They won't have sex, apparently, meaning intercourse, but other things are game. This means that she gets down on all fours, while he is seated and sucks his cock arching her back as much as possible to present that beautiful lilt of flesh from the small of the back to her bottom. Or so I imagine.

I spent the night with my eyes trained on her cleavage. Occasionally imploring her to show me more. Finally, we started talking about my indecent proposition. Primarily indecent because it was such a paltry sum. I wanted to kiss her, to have her disrobe before me, for her to get down on hands and knees before me, turning towards me at first engorging my cock in her mouth, and then turning away from me as I fucked her from behind.

She let me give her a backrub. The rub is, that I mean too much to her. If we were to do it again, it would immediately lead to some emotional complications, because, as I have said in an earlier post, sex is our language. Now you can see to what degree.

As I walked down her stairs, to the door, she leaned over the ledge above, watching me leave. Her wonderful and full, so full breasts hanging just slightly over that ledge. During sex she would, after I showed her that I liked this, pull my face into her breasts while she was riding me. Then I would come inside of her. All of my future into her.

the anthropologist

Being in Florida I have had the odd occasion to think of the anthropologist: lcb. Her family was from this state. I cannot remember where. This was years ago. Now she teaches up north. She was quite beautiful, albeit frazzled. But I suppose I have no room to speak on such matters. She had this birthmark that stretched across her shoulder.

I met her through my closest friend in the world. She was his exe and he thought, given our interests, we might have things in common. We started exchanging emails. She was then at the Harvard of the South, I was in Independence Land. I remember she sent me lifted lines from Emily Dickinson and this, in particular, seduced me. Our emails were fanciful rather than direct. Oblique. I wrote about pressing thumbs, about Jean Genet. She wrote about the fork and the spoon. I am not even sure that we were really writing about ideas at the time. It was more about the intuitions of ideas. This was early in my training and coming out of a literary background, I could still speak in that register. It would be dreadful to think how we might talk now. Now I am afraid that my authority would drown those possibilities. This is the effect of training.

We first met at the Met. It was December 1999, I think. This was after several months of exchanged emails. She was going to NY to visit relatives. I had just broken up with MC and had no idea that the latter was carrying my child. Which I would only find out a month later, after she had aborted the pregnancy, and despite my political convictions, I would tarry with the guilt. We walked through the ancient exhibits, aimlessly. I think still petrified by the fact that we had just met this other person who had produced so much desire. When we left, about an hour later, we kissed, standing by a park bench. That night we went to a bar and drank a lot, had dinner. And then I drove her to Queens, where I left her.

I was 26 when I met her. She came to visit me several weeks later. To stay with me. Which was fine with me. I was smitten. But I was curiously wholly impotent around her. I remember her naked on my bed, on all fours with her back arching and I was completely unable to plunder to fuck that incredible ass. Instead, I touched her all the other ways I knew how. I am sure that my lips spent a lot of time between her legs.

Several months later, despite the disappointment (and surprise, for me) of that incident, she invited me to visit her, deep in the South. It was strange being there, if not particularly because my grandfather had just died, only months before, in that Southern city. She picked me up at the airport in her cheap car whose climate control was stuck to unbearably hot.

When we arrived back at her apartment, that eve, we went into her dark apartment. I put down my stuff and sat on her bed. She started kissing me and within minutes she was mounted atop me. I had no trouble this time. And no plastic sheath separated her holiest of holies from my cock. For the next seven days we fucked continually.

We took apart her bedframe and put the mattress on the floor because it created such a racket. Since I could not come in her, I would pull out and she would then put my cock into her mouth and swallow all of it. Once while she was working at her computer, I crawled beneath her legs and kissed her. My tongue struggling to press inside of her. She made me stand in front of her, still seated. She unzipped my pants and licked my cock up and down like a popsicle. It became so hard in her mouth, with the head turning darker purple. We went into the bedroom and I sat down on her chair. I was still so hard and she did not mount me but turned around, casually, as if she was going to sit in the chair as if I was not even there. She slowly lowered herself onto my cock.

How sublime was this crude turgidity and the sharpness of sensation it enables, as my cock pushed into her. My hands were on her hips and pulling her down upon me. The curve of her back, how it narrowed and then swelled on her hips. The line of her spine pointing down to the tip of my sex.

"You're fucking me so hard."

"I want you to fill my pussy with your cum. I don't care. I want all of you in me."

"I want to feel the pulses of your cock and the warmth of your cum in me."

I was in love with her. I wanted the abomination that mirrors and copulation share.

An Indecent Proposal

Tonight I was watching this movie. Or rather, paying attention to it, every now and again. While doing other things. Since I didn't watch all of it, much of what I will say may be pointless. But I feel confident in the purchase of my opinions. And as I have said in other venues, I don't need to see all of something to make a judgment.

There is nothing remarkable about this movie, in total. I suppose it pretends to raise these questions about money and sexuality and love and the thin lines that separate these things. The premise is that this ultimately honorable fellow, played by R. Redford, suggests that a starving architect sell his wife's body for one night for the price of $1M. Of course, the money offers opportunities that seem to outweigh the moral or emotional consequences ... or at least block them from view. The architect, of course, loses his wife to that night of calculated passion. Money for flesh. But in the end, she returns to him, although partially through the surfeit of the ultimately honorable millionaire.

I have never paid for sex. That is, paid cash for sex. I have probably paid for it in other ways. As it is, sex is always regulated by exchange, especially when we ostentatiously reserve it for those who love us. But we are sickened (when we follow the upturned nose of our moral sense) by the odor of exchange when it approaches the sexual act. Or so we say.

In the film, the wife never (at least as far as I could tell) claims that she is not merely a piece of property. Either to her husband or to her would-be paramour. In fact, she even offers herself as exchange as a sign of her love for her husband: this would be good for him and as a gesture of love she would be willing to sacrifice herself. I suppose there is a bit of provocative "social realism" in this, insofar as she is admitting that the laws governing property include her body. Yet, if this realism is not made tacit, then it merely subsists beneath a hypocritical and lying morality, of the manifest "indecency" of this proposal. The inscrutable bonds of marriage and their obligations.

An email exchange with Marianne has made me wonder about my options. I want desperately, while Myra's suitor, my colleague, is in Italy, to get in touch with her. And I too am several hundreds of miles away from my beloved. Perhaps just to say hi. Perhaps for more. Of course, more is presently impossible. I'm hundreds of miles from Myra. Until now, I must say that I have, with the exception of several drunken evenings, not suffered such a desire. At least since the event with Myra went sour. And it was a good thing that it did.

While watching this movie, particular the scenes directly following the proposal where the married couple consider it, I thought, why don't they, instead of merely considering the financial possibilities this proposal would enable, also think about the emotional and moral consequences? Frequently I have other level-headed thoughts while watching movies about men that cannot express themselves to the women that they love. I say to myself, just tell her that you love her! In fact, I think these thoughts are no less preposterous (yet again from some remove) than the wish for the characters of a horror film to turn on the lights ... or leave the room. Reflection will not save us from all of the bad judgments to which we will surrender. Reflection has its own conditions. These conditions are frequently inaccessible.

Oh Myra. Would that you read this journal. Or perhaps not. I do not know. I know that if I talk to her again, I am not sure what would happen. Things have come together with Anya in such a way, as of late, that it would be unfortunate to disturb them. And in fact, I have seen the "vicissitudes" of Myra's emotions. I know just how imperfect she is. I don't care about the fact that she is flat-chested. She has, nonetheless, an incredible body. And the face of an angel. Like Meryl Streep. Those eyes and that hue of skin. It is the way that she looks at you (me) that is killing. And her confusion around me. And the fact that this woman I'd pined for, silently, for years, wanted me. Was addicted to me.

Of course, the kiss was always strained. Never right, because of the moment. And I would never get past the waistband of those underwear. Which maybe is okay. Maybe I like the communication and the complicity more than the collision of bodies. Maybe.

A Dream of A Thousand Loves

Last night I dreamt of a thousand loves. This morning the words hung on my lips, as I carried myself out of bed. I never dream of my fiancée ... what this means, I dare not ask. Instead, I dreamt of a girl with whom I made out. A girl. Perhaps a student. Typically I dream of conscience infidelity.

I wonder if I speak of this theme continually, if my readers will observe that I am not asking for comfort or compassion or understanding. My reader, it might be better to say. Marianne. I know nothing of you, except for your midriff. One of those areas of the body that make men losen their ties and breathe more deeply, hoping to draw the odor of another part of the body.

My body, on the other hand. 'Tis long. I have green eyes. I have brown hair. I have fair skin. I have small hands, small feet (need I question the "I" and the strangeness of attributing possession to it, when rather, these possessions are I!). I have scars. Or they have me. I have a scar on my crown. Several, in fact. I have a scarred bone, the bottom of the left tibia. Two fractures. I like material things that have memories, but some of my first and most powerful emotional responses were of material things that would never be the same. "The same." Philosophy has nothing to do with it.

And of course, there is your own deep attraction towards lovers, despite your marital bliss. Whom your husband does not know, no?

I don't want to speak again of Anya. I need this badness. This evil. It makes me feel strong again. A different kind of strong than the kind I have with her. The kind of strength that I have with her is of extreme quietude. With her, I am a Buddhist cow.

I have been thinking of Myra. Oh Myra. Her boyfriend/wannabe-husband has gone to Italy. I know she is now alone for the next month. And I want to contact her. He has cheated on her. With a woman (AT) with whom I have cheated on Anya. The symmetry is frightening and hilarious. Last night I dreamt of him, which was really a dream of her. He was getting into an old VW van. Backing out of the driveway of a house in Syracuse NY. Why did my dream get situated there? In his back, as he was leaving the house, literally as he was going out the door, I saw the small of her back.

This, as I may or may not have informed you, was that vital area of the body that inspired the step not beyond (le pas/pas déla). At this point, a homosexual dream would be delightful. Even merely homoerotic. But I am blind to all but women. Yesterday I walked through the supermarket. My sister has been diagnosed with MS. I am taking care of her while her fiancé travels to visit his parents in the old, old country. This just happened a few days ago. I might as well tell you that I am thinking of changing this to my regular journal. A far cry from my threat to abandon it altogether, no?

Would this mean that I would identify myself, as "Bryce," has (a moniker with which I am starting to tire) with the vile actions with which I engage, that otherwise populate only my subconscious ... j'ne sais pas.

In the shower I thought this morning, philosophy should be defined as the act of following. Whereas the poetic inspiration is what leads. Now don't be confused. I am not saying that poetic inspiration leads philosophy. It does sometimes. But while poetic inspiration may provide the initial direction, philosophy, when it is good, follows a continuous trail. There is soemthing truly creative about that. Philosophy (Kant being the example par excellence everyone says) doesn't know where it will end. Neither does poetry, but poetry dances. It leaps.

Breasts

At a distance, I regain the composure that allows me this secret expression. With her, I lose this voice. I do not begrudge her.

I just travelled back here from NYC last night. A whole day unpacking my belongings. Well, mainly just all of my books. Getting locked out of the apartment. Then in the car, to sit in traffic outside the Holland Tunnel for at least an hour. Oh, I was so clever leaving at rush hour!

Here, protected by distance, voluptuous bodies reappear in their full sensual splendor. Last night, I see the girl from the coffeeshop. I used to gaze at her body as she stood on top of a chair to change the station on the radio. She is 21 or 22. A college dropout. She is Chinese. Very beautiful.

But what floors me in particular are all of the breasts. Women passing by me here, sitting over there, etc. All of them with these breasts concealed by a bra and some suggestive outer garment.