Do you really think it is weakness that yields to temptation? I
tell you that there are terrible temptations which it requires strength
and courage to yield to.
~~~~~ Oscar Wilde ~~~~~
I.
To Faire With Love
“It had been a very hot day at Ren Faire. My chemise stuck to my skin,
smelling of burnt onions and peat dust. Sweat had been running between my
legs, puddling in the tight, deerskin boots, making the backs of my knees
itch. I walked the steep hill, stumbling on rocks and tree knees more
than normally, then gathered my soap, shampoo, and towel from the tent.”~~~~~ Oscar Wilde ~~~~~
I.
To Faire With Love
Before I began this narrative I was stepping from a tin shower in a tree draped log cabin deep in the Smoky Mountains, my lover’s home. The scene flashed in my mind and I begged to tell him the tale.
“Sure” he said.
“As I reached the line of three shower stalls that served all the actors in camp, I knew I was late. Usually I would sneak uphill before the crowds arrived, but there had been a delay. So to my eyes came a line of at least fifty people, all holding towels and soap, all knowing that cool water and cold beer were still a long wait away.
“Standing at the back I let impatience be my guide. In the torment of dust an idea broached and righted.
"Now fancy me in my tea-dyed shift, tight waisted in two long skirts, bodice loosened with cow hide laces slack. The hat was tossed and my bright red hair matted and
stuck back, cheeks brightened by heat and dirtied from the day’s dust mauling events. I had come to faire alone, unique for me, so had no lover to soothe my night --- at least not as yet. Fancy me, whose name and reputation had probably been gossiped by the other actors, as lady of men half her age. Fancy me.
“I moved to the front of the line, turned to face the tired actors, and in my best theatrical voice piped: 'Does anyone want their back washed?' Three women stared at me, there was a quiet snicker, and then in the very front of the line, a diminutive and very young man, said ‘me’, and I walked to his side and waited for the next clean actor to leave the showers.
“I didn’t know his guild, had never encountered him on the rocky, rutted street, yet we two, giggling, walked into the shower stall and closed the curtain. Stripped from our garb we were two smelly, sweaty creatures so I turned the knobs and polished a rag with soap. I did indeed wash his back. Then I scrubbed his legs, his feet, and rinsed the rag. I shampooed his hair, then washed his face, arms and chest. The young man was sandy haired, with a gracious smile, and I lathered his crotch and rear, taking care to use my bare hands along with the bunched rag. After a bit I dropped to my knees and continued his joy. (They didn’t call it the the Renaissance Pleasure Faire for nothing.) Once the young man was pleased, I washed my own body, kissed him, and we exited the showers to the eyes of the jealous and offended.”
“So,” says my lover of the Smokey Mountains, “the next evening there was an even longer line at the showers waiting for the crazy lady to return?”
II.
OH, BABY!
OH, BABY!
At some time when I wasn’t quite watching, feminism grabbed men by the
balls and taught them a few misconceptions that are interfering with my sex
life. They took the female response,
blurred it into a “one size fits all” , and made a sort of orgasmic soup that
apparently satisfies most women, but leaves me struggling.
The whole problem is this concentration on my clitoris, assuming that
by single minded attention to this tiny spot a man can produce a solitary
pleasure blast which is supposed to be what all women want. I beg to differ.
Now mind you, if you lock me into a room with a proper vibrator and no
partner I can, in just a couple of
minutes, produce a series of very satisfying orgasms. You might think that you’ve been replaced by an electrified gun
that shoots the necessity of your manhood off the planet. But in my case, I’ve simply found a
temporary way to insure that my libido doesn’t disappear while I’m waiting for
a real man to enter my life.
By now men know that most sexually alive women like to play with their
fingers or toys in the absence of a satisfying man. What they don’t know is not all ladies are searching for a man
with a slow hand or a fast tongue --- a
replacement for what women do for themselves.
In my case I can enjoy solitary concentration on my clitoris by a man
(or a woman) for about two
minutes. It won’t produce an orgasm,
but it will bring everything in my body below the waistline and above the knees
into joyous alert. After that my
clitoris goes into hiding and the remainder of me aches for intercourse ---
I’ve finished the appetizer and am ready for the entrée.
Even scientists who study sex agree that the human mind is an essential
sexual organ. When I’m alone, I give my
mind a fantasy, usually a recreation of a past enjoyment, and that, as much as
the electric toy, is what leads me into orgasm. But when I’m with a person, I’ve no need for fantasy. My mind has a present toy, and that one is
in grasping distance, but unfortunately busy down south where I can’t hug and
kiss him thus leaving me with my concentration on my sensations rather than
him. It seems pointless to create an
outside fantasy, when the source of my pleasure is right at hand and my poor
clitoris, alarmed by my pin pointed concentration on itself, hides itself and
ceases to send great sensations.
My pleasure in sex is created from the pleasure of my partner. While he might be thoroughly enjoying the
manipulations of his hand or tongue on my nether regions, I have no real
feedback to tell me that. Not being
about to fantasize some other situation, I soon bore of any congress that
doesn’t include a clear indication of my partner’s joy. I’m not a bit interested in having a solo
orgasm separated from my partner. I
want my pleasure and his pleasure to happen simultaneously, not serially.
I’m not at all sure how sex therapists and feminists got the idea I
want an orgasm independent of my partner.
My joy in sex is not the ending, but the experience of a warm, loving,
participating union. I want my hands,
legs, mouth, sense of smell, hearing, vagina, and yes --- even my clitoris ---
to be enjoying my partner all at the same time. Will I have an orgasm?
You betcha, probably many. What
do you need to do to make that happen?
Enjoy yourself. It works for me.
UNION
Autumn was skirting around August. It was still warm in the days, but there were those random williwaws that come up in the evening that deposit the tulip tree leaves ugly and brown on still very green lawns, collecting in the middle of blooming flowers, and spoiling the gardens. Joan lay that night in sheets still warm with the day, a blanket footing the bed, and she was lusciously clammed by three pillows and snuggled against a fourth when the dream began.
First there was the usual chaotic assortment of vivid, random images --- a skunk cuddled into a box, discovered by a group of people disagreeing on the correct response, and Joan feared one would alarm the small beast into producing the fetid squirting. Somewhere under the dream she knew the critter was hunting past her house, leaving whiffs behind him. In and about the skunk stench the dream moved to a huge kitchen. Then there was an abundance of fishes, laid out headless in preparation for cooking, large salmon and steelhead, fresh smelling and shiny, dripping sea water onto the floor. Onions, garlic, and tomatoes stewed, and around those moved an assortment of happy friends, cooking, remarking, watching, smiling. The faces of the friends were unfamiliar, but in this dream she knew them and watched them warmly, enjoying the bustle and the pungency of the food.
"Where's the saffron?" One of the cooking friends was looking at her, head cranked around and she knew that this huge shining kitchen was hers, that one of her daydreams now had come to join in the pillow fantasy.
"It's in the panel of spices," and Joan was relaying information, helping these sprightly dream folk with their concoctions.
"Salmon in a rich, spicy broth, sourdough bread, avocados with a buttery olive oil, and a light Malbec. What do you think, Joan. E 'grande?"
"Si, che e grande," she called back, she who knew no Italian boldly speaking.
Still dreaming Joan then found herself walking into a small room with a bed where she saw her husband David, or he saw her and drew her forward and he wanted her. They embraced, giggled, then were in the bed where she could smell him and feel his skin. She heard his gravely voice, warm and grumbling, and he was there against her as he had been so many times, firing desire as they touched, and moved, and struggled to remove clothes. It had been so long since they’d been together and intense need rose in both of them and he was poised and ready, and she was stirred and welcoming when the cooking friends came through the door with laughing and questions and wine, so the couple stopped to join them.
David rarely appeared in Joan’s dreams. When he did she would know he’d been there but she arrived too late, or he was due but she would already be gone, or he just didn’t find her interesting. In her past dreams David didn’t want her, wanted someone else, found her boring or useless, and issued commands but no glances. So for fifteen years all of Joan’s dreams containing David had brought a sense of isolation and loss --- until the one in August.
For fifteen years Joan had been a widow from the one relationship of her life that had been right. Never having believed in the “soul mate” theory, it proved itself to her anyway. David and Joan had lived in a nearly perfect balance, a compliment of personalities. But their communion had gone beyond that. There had been moments when she couldn’t tell which of them was which, or whether they were actually two separate people at all, but instead a single animated being of much greater merit than just the two combined. She could touch his skin and just slide into his body, not sexually, but super-humanly, sharing the same being-ness, as the perception of one-ness was that intense. And while it was real life, and all the real mistakes and discord happened, there was this substantial correctness in the relationship as though they were both finally complete on this unjust and cruel earth so that neither ever needed to be completely alone again. And then he died.
Joan rolled over in bed and then back into the dream, and clutching David’s hand, they rose to solve the kitchen problems and enjoy the conviviality of the friends. Plumes from bubbling pots rose about them and she could feel the flakes of fish on her tongue, pliant and infused with garlic and herbs. Stainless counters became coated with steam droplets as the whole dream was suffused with a foggy heat.
Finally, finding David beside her she led him back to the small room with the soft bed. They nestled into the cotton sheets and touching him she could feel the bumps along his back, see that curly, gray hair, coarse and smelling of soap, and the feel of him soft was on her tongue as her nose caught that genital scent that humans give off except that this was the one that was uniquely his. Her senses held all those elements that made David a particular person. All the things she could never remember after his death --- the ragged cadence of his voice, thick with humor, the largeness of his six foot plus frame, the way his fingernails curled down into the flesh looking like little shovels --- all these things, lost awake, were present in the man with whom she loved here in this dream state, which at that moment was the only reality.
The thing most stunning to Joan about death was the finality of it. Within a few days of David’s demise she’d lost that sense of constant touch with him. She cast about wishing up a ghost, but none came and the details, the little things, quickly fled her memory and she realized that it took the living person not memory to create existence. And there was this longing feeling of not being finished, that there was more for them to do and be together, and that now, with David dead, she would forever be just half a person --- less than half since they actually seemed much more than two together.
Dawn was far off, she was not yet awake, and the dream pulled Joan back inside --- back into friends cooking fish in another room. The warmth of vaporous dishes, the scent of oregano and onions, all the clatter and babbling as the couple wandered back in to find a table set. Flowers tumbled from an improvised vase, Deruta bowls were haphazard in front of chairs, and friends were carrying trenchers with the great fishes and bowls of fragrant broth and weedy greens --- all these items were strewn about the table accompanied by jocular talking, giggling, and winking. Joan brushed damp flying hair from here eyes as a friend yelled,
“vieni, siediti” “Sit here, eat with us,” as she chose a chair and inhaled both scents and the sense of the place.
“Mangia, eat eat,” said a laughing woman at her side. “Va bene, godere.”
Joan tasted soft, herb infused fish, all sweet and dripping. She seemed to be eating with her fingers and the juices ran to her elbows. She mopped the broth with torn, crisp bread and yeast fragrances mixed with the other food as she breathed the satisfaction of repast shared with others.
Then the fragrance changed to the moist scent of love making, fecund and piquant while she saw sunshine on a warm bed and felt David caught up to her. All the sensations that made reality splendid had crowded into her dream world --- smell, taste, and touch were abundant and inflaming. David’s face had a days beard that scratched her cheek. Sun heated one of her feet and he opened his eyes and looked down at her, finding home in the black pupils as she disappeared into his. She had that sense of his weight on her, his breath in her ear, and then she grabbed at his back as he arched and vocalized, and she moved with and against him and they slid in together with no skin and no distinction and no present and no past.
Somewhere at the edge of consciousness the skunk whiffed in. Joan inhaled and opened one eye to see the pre-dawn light, then realized that what had been her only reality was simply a dream, although at the time it had been indistinguishable from the actual, and at this moment of waking her life seemed to lack the rich texture that she had enjoyed in the illusion. It was pointless to even wish to return, yet she was dazed to find that the veil between the real world and the dream one was so reversed that at that moment actuality had less density.
Through a screened window Joan could hear dried leaves scuffle. A loan bird had begun it’s morning warble. A gauzy curtain stirred, then blew across her head, glancing her nose in it’s drift. Breathing more deeply she brought herself fully into her life, but savored the renewal and completion of the past.
First there was the usual chaotic assortment of vivid, random images --- a skunk cuddled into a box, discovered by a group of people disagreeing on the correct response, and Joan feared one would alarm the small beast into producing the fetid squirting. Somewhere under the dream she knew the critter was hunting past her house, leaving whiffs behind him. In and about the skunk stench the dream moved to a huge kitchen. Then there was an abundance of fishes, laid out headless in preparation for cooking, large salmon and steelhead, fresh smelling and shiny, dripping sea water onto the floor. Onions, garlic, and tomatoes stewed, and around those moved an assortment of happy friends, cooking, remarking, watching, smiling. The faces of the friends were unfamiliar, but in this dream she knew them and watched them warmly, enjoying the bustle and the pungency of the food.
"Where's the saffron?" One of the cooking friends was looking at her, head cranked around and she knew that this huge shining kitchen was hers, that one of her daydreams now had come to join in the pillow fantasy.
"It's in the panel of spices," and Joan was relaying information, helping these sprightly dream folk with their concoctions.
"Salmon in a rich, spicy broth, sourdough bread, avocados with a buttery olive oil, and a light Malbec. What do you think, Joan. E 'grande?"
"Si, che e grande," she called back, she who knew no Italian boldly speaking.
Still dreaming Joan then found herself walking into a small room with a bed where she saw her husband David, or he saw her and drew her forward and he wanted her. They embraced, giggled, then were in the bed where she could smell him and feel his skin. She heard his gravely voice, warm and grumbling, and he was there against her as he had been so many times, firing desire as they touched, and moved, and struggled to remove clothes. It had been so long since they’d been together and intense need rose in both of them and he was poised and ready, and she was stirred and welcoming when the cooking friends came through the door with laughing and questions and wine, so the couple stopped to join them.
David rarely appeared in Joan’s dreams. When he did she would know he’d been there but she arrived too late, or he was due but she would already be gone, or he just didn’t find her interesting. In her past dreams David didn’t want her, wanted someone else, found her boring or useless, and issued commands but no glances. So for fifteen years all of Joan’s dreams containing David had brought a sense of isolation and loss --- until the one in August.
For fifteen years Joan had been a widow from the one relationship of her life that had been right. Never having believed in the “soul mate” theory, it proved itself to her anyway. David and Joan had lived in a nearly perfect balance, a compliment of personalities. But their communion had gone beyond that. There had been moments when she couldn’t tell which of them was which, or whether they were actually two separate people at all, but instead a single animated being of much greater merit than just the two combined. She could touch his skin and just slide into his body, not sexually, but super-humanly, sharing the same being-ness, as the perception of one-ness was that intense. And while it was real life, and all the real mistakes and discord happened, there was this substantial correctness in the relationship as though they were both finally complete on this unjust and cruel earth so that neither ever needed to be completely alone again. And then he died.
Joan rolled over in bed and then back into the dream, and clutching David’s hand, they rose to solve the kitchen problems and enjoy the conviviality of the friends. Plumes from bubbling pots rose about them and she could feel the flakes of fish on her tongue, pliant and infused with garlic and herbs. Stainless counters became coated with steam droplets as the whole dream was suffused with a foggy heat.
Finally, finding David beside her she led him back to the small room with the soft bed. They nestled into the cotton sheets and touching him she could feel the bumps along his back, see that curly, gray hair, coarse and smelling of soap, and the feel of him soft was on her tongue as her nose caught that genital scent that humans give off except that this was the one that was uniquely his. Her senses held all those elements that made David a particular person. All the things she could never remember after his death --- the ragged cadence of his voice, thick with humor, the largeness of his six foot plus frame, the way his fingernails curled down into the flesh looking like little shovels --- all these things, lost awake, were present in the man with whom she loved here in this dream state, which at that moment was the only reality.
The thing most stunning to Joan about death was the finality of it. Within a few days of David’s demise she’d lost that sense of constant touch with him. She cast about wishing up a ghost, but none came and the details, the little things, quickly fled her memory and she realized that it took the living person not memory to create existence. And there was this longing feeling of not being finished, that there was more for them to do and be together, and that now, with David dead, she would forever be just half a person --- less than half since they actually seemed much more than two together.
Dawn was far off, she was not yet awake, and the dream pulled Joan back inside --- back into friends cooking fish in another room. The warmth of vaporous dishes, the scent of oregano and onions, all the clatter and babbling as the couple wandered back in to find a table set. Flowers tumbled from an improvised vase, Deruta bowls were haphazard in front of chairs, and friends were carrying trenchers with the great fishes and bowls of fragrant broth and weedy greens --- all these items were strewn about the table accompanied by jocular talking, giggling, and winking. Joan brushed damp flying hair from here eyes as a friend yelled,
“vieni, siediti” “Sit here, eat with us,” as she chose a chair and inhaled both scents and the sense of the place.
“Mangia, eat eat,” said a laughing woman at her side. “Va bene, godere.”
Joan tasted soft, herb infused fish, all sweet and dripping. She seemed to be eating with her fingers and the juices ran to her elbows. She mopped the broth with torn, crisp bread and yeast fragrances mixed with the other food as she breathed the satisfaction of repast shared with others.
Then the fragrance changed to the moist scent of love making, fecund and piquant while she saw sunshine on a warm bed and felt David caught up to her. All the sensations that made reality splendid had crowded into her dream world --- smell, taste, and touch were abundant and inflaming. David’s face had a days beard that scratched her cheek. Sun heated one of her feet and he opened his eyes and looked down at her, finding home in the black pupils as she disappeared into his. She had that sense of his weight on her, his breath in her ear, and then she grabbed at his back as he arched and vocalized, and she moved with and against him and they slid in together with no skin and no distinction and no present and no past.
Somewhere at the edge of consciousness the skunk whiffed in. Joan inhaled and opened one eye to see the pre-dawn light, then realized that what had been her only reality was simply a dream, although at the time it had been indistinguishable from the actual, and at this moment of waking her life seemed to lack the rich texture that she had enjoyed in the illusion. It was pointless to even wish to return, yet she was dazed to find that the veil between the real world and the dream one was so reversed that at that moment actuality had less density.
Through a screened window Joan could hear dried leaves scuffle. A loan bird had begun it’s morning warble. A gauzy curtain stirred, then blew across her head, glancing her nose in it’s drift. Breathing more deeply she brought herself fully into her life, but savored the renewal and completion of the past.
IV.
In meditation we worked with pain. My teacher explained that it was much easier to find enlightenment through pain than through pleasure. The path was more direct, there were fewer temptations, one was less likely to stray. The profit of working with pain is in finding that it can be dismembered, parsed into tidbits. It’s just a matter of time and attention plus allowing fear to recede and curiosity to come forth. I never doubted this. I’d had my encounters with pain broken into joy and could testify.
But as a person with many years of experience with pleasure, the question was about that other path --- the one of pleasure? Could one sort out the dots of joy and simply see them as sensation, rather than collapsing into golden abyss of desire?
It consumes you, pleasure does. You but think of that person who has touched you in all ways, with hands, lips, brushes of the chest, hard points of penis, and the thought itself boils passion, rising like adrenaline, but more effervescent, more penetrating, imbuing all cells with eye closing, sigh making, exquisiteness. When I sit in a room next to this person, not touching, not talking, my breath goes short and the fires ignite. My words, my dear abundant words of clarity, diminish to simple guttural tones, throat clearings, whimpers. I become limp. I blink and fight to appear unaffected.
Pain is a clear thing. One knows when the body has crossed into pain and the urge is to leave. But pleasure one clings to. One sidles up to it, draws it in close, and asks it to stay the night, the week, to never leave. How does one draw back from desire long enough to dissect it’s golden points into simplicity to be understood rather than indulged. And what does one have after shredding pleasure to bits? I didn’t know. I was seeking.
V.
BABA'S SONG
BABA'S SONG
Baba he called her. A pet name with a lovely open sound, it resembled her actual name, but also reduced her, yet she accepted it fully just as she would accept ways of his that confounded her. Their first meeting followed a virtual introduction, so when she arrived at the café she searched for him, matching that tiny photo to each face until she finally found him leaning against a battered car, looking at her with a cocked head, chin down, quizzically.
“It must be you,” he said. The first of many short sentences, which in retrospect she found dismissive, but in present tense simply terse.
“Well, yes if you’re Luigi, it’s me,” and he followed her back into the café.
Four or five sentences followed --- something about weather, she asked if he wanted a latte’, no he didn’t and then he said,
“Whadiya think?”
She puzzled for a moment, then realizing that the conversation would be very short she said, “yes”.
And that was that.
“Baba,” he said.
“Huh?” she replied as he handed her a glass of wine. Then she gazed around the room. It was densely furnished with a wall of palms and tall philodendrons against the big window, a large bubbling fish tank, and an assortment of well chosen antiques and pieces with an Oriental theme. Big drums occupied the clear spaces on the floor and guitars leaned against chairs.
She drank the wine, she looked at his gray-brown kinky hair, the cargo pants, the sun-browned arms. He was a healthy creature with a New York City accent and the curt speech of a city kid.
Pointing to the bedroom he piped “Whadiya say, Baba?”
It was later, when she started searching for her earrings, exhausted and stunned by the raw jewel of Luigi in this small town, that she began to look at that room. The walls were poppy red, the bed of sturdy, shiny brass, and there was a population of oak dressers each of which was topped with lace and trinkets --- miniature tea cups, crystal votive jars, silk scarves with floral print. It had the taste of a Victorian bordello belonging to this spawn of Sicily and the Bronx.
“Beautiful, strange, and delicious,” she said to herself. “Very delicious.”
She snuggled down into the red sheets, covered her head, and slept.
Luigi sat on bed edge and sucked again on the pipe.
“You can’t sleep, Baba!” he said as he crawled against her, moving large hands around her body. “You can’t sleep.”
She made that little noise her dog made, the grumpy sound gurgled and ground from the back of the throat when it was foiled in it’s needs. He rubbed and stroked, ignorant that she was tired, too stoned to care. Finally he stumbled to the kitchen, poured cheap gin into a small glass, and went down a story to the computer.
Baba woke at seven. She always woke at seven. Light came foggily through a gauze curtain faced by a spiny plant. The thin, upright leaves fanned and splayed, looking like mislaid rays, fuzzy on the edges. Curled up a foot or so away, Luigi wore thin pajama bottoms and a t-shirt. He breathed heavily. Light footed she left the room.
Chaos greeted her in his kitchen. Every surface was covered with jars of food, new and opened; piles of vitamin bottles, stacks of mail, keys, corkscrews, all the detritus of a life seemed to bloom on those counters. Opening a cupboard door something fell and behind each door was a crowd, a multiplicity whose organization was based on much rather than availibility. Finally she found a glass. She washed off the fingerprints and drank water. In the fridge she also found abundance, spilling out, tumbling down, fruits and veges, beer and chickens, avocados, mangoes, at least three large pineapples. He certainly ate well, but how could one person eat so much? Taking an overripe banana as breakfast she cleared a drum off the nearest chair, sat, and sighed.
Then she began to ponder on their night. He had smoked, she drank wine, he stripped and she kept her red bra, the one with lace and bows. He began to talk. That night he talked through the Santana and on into the Allman Brothers and said,
“This is so real, Baba, look at you, just look at you.”
He talked like thunder and he whispered in her ear and at times he would grab her hair, pulling her head back while he held her with the other arm, immobilizing her above the waist. It was almost a fight, a tussle of strength, with legs and sweat, and then she squatted above him, then he pinned her into the mattress. She made her little sounds at first, the coos and mews that sounded good to her, but as they fought their way through the congress, as she began to lose track of herself, she became guttural with groans and gasps. As he talked he asked her questions. Baba had no answers. She had lost her words so she answered with an escape of air, a grin, a laugh, then snuggled her nose into his neck and worked her tongue down to his belly.
After the banana she walked into Luigi’s bedroom, sat, and softly told him she’d go home. He smiled, rose long enough to see her out, and returned to sleep.
Sometimes they went at night to dance at a brewery hosting a band. Sometimes they ate Mexican food. And sometimes he spread antipasto around the glass table with fresh mozzarella, anchovies, crackers, and raw vegetables. They’d nosh, drink wine, talk on light subjects and then once again he’d say,
“Whadiya think, Baba?’
They’d go into the lurid red room, turn on the Allmans, and wrestle each other in a game both would win. With nose to his neck she find the scents of red sandalwood and patchouli, in his hair there was cedar, and between his legs was the heavenly aroma of a natural man inflamed with passion. Her lust for him was intense. The crescendos were constant and she could feel the waves of moisture within, the gushing of her own overwhelming pleasure.
And Baba sang. She sang in cries, howls, and deep, inarticulate explosions. While Luigi talked, like a Cetacean she sounded.
“I love these sounds,” he said. “Sing to me Baba.”
She wrapped her legs around his neck, she tucked one over his shoulder and lowered the other beside his leg. She turned and tucked him from behind, then lowered herself onto those full, babbling lips. Baba opened her mouth and wrapped her tongue around his glans, drawing the tongue up from the base to the tip, slobbering over his penis and alternating from fast to slow. Like a warm, slimy piston, she used him in her mouth, caressing her throat with him, rubbing along the inside and out of her cheeks, with spit running off her chin. She nuzzled back and forth with her nose and circled the head with her lips, rolling it, tasting it, enjoying the smoothness, feeling the hairs along her cheeks, sniffing deeply for all the scents of him.
They counted their time by the musicians they heard on the stereo. Their motion was timed to the drums, the lamenting guitars. Candles fizzled, sweat salted the sheets, and Baba couldn’t count her orgasms.
“How many?” Luigi would ask.
“You count them, I am lost in feeling them,” she said.
Hanging onto that brass bed, tangled in a red sheet, Baba sank into love, into sensual, vocalized, raging love, and lost herself in this delicious, exhausting beast of a lover.
Each meeting was different, but each time he said, “it’s never been like this. You are amazing.”
And she would remind him over and over that “It’s we who are amazing, not me.” And he would say nothing.
Some days Luigi would swat her bum until finally “ouch” would stop him. At times he wouldn’t stop, he’d continue until she writhed away, turned to him, and laughed.
He once said, “I’m so pleased you let me do that .”
Often she toggled between lust and fear, not quite trusting how far the struggle would go, but she always met his strength with enough of her own to keep the war even. After there would be tenderness, “mush” he called it, almost mocking, almost begging for the affection she gave. And after her body would vibrate within, tiny fast waves of sensation would continue for hours, and eventually days, leaving her clothed in smiles and gasping in super markets, confusing check out ladies as she giggled to herself.
Luigi always ate like a starving man, shoveling and snapping. He fucked like one as well, but he wasn’t satisfied as quickly. And he would look down at her as though studying.
“How did you get to be this way?” he’d say.
“What way?” she’d reply, although she knew what he meant. She was beyond hot, she was frenzied, she was channeled into her senses and beyond orgasmic.
He’d try again, “What makes you this way?”
Lost in her sensations she had no reply, she could sputter an invective, she could chirp and wail, but she couldn’t explain.
And as the months followed, as the nights multiplied, the feelings built.
She wasn’t insatiable, that old image of the nymphomaniac. Each orgasm was total satisfaction, but in minutes, sometimes moments, a new need arose, the itch for satisfaction renewed itself, and over and over she contracted and then expanded into that blast of sensation. Eventually it was sufficient and she thought of her partner. He wasn’t bored, he was amazed, he was astonished. Each time he was that way --- wide eyed, but yet in some way an observer, a participant yet preserving a distance.
The end came brutally, suddenly. There was a night that she was in a heaven of pure pleasure. The flood of joy didn’t abate. She woke in the morning salivating, rolling her eyes, and with a delicious concentration of flames at her hips. She asked to see him soon.
“You choose the day,” he said.
But when the day arrived, he was cool.
“Nancy has come back, I need to think this over.”
Nancy? The Nancy who left suddenly and never said “goodbye”? The same lady who twisted his heart into pieces and heartlessly ignored him? He’d never mentioned she might return, that he could forgive the vicious departure.
Baba lay on her bed and ached. With a body electric and a mule-kicked mind, she whined and complained. She called friends and cried. Deep from her throat came the sounds of grief, loud and ugly, hard on the heart and isolated. Her billowing sadness streamed though her chest and she struggled with her root source, her sexual craving.
Luigi had never said he loved her.
“Mush,” he had said. “Baba is mushy,” were his words when she hugged and cuddled. Everything in her being spoke from her heart, her hands, her total willingness to do anything in that garish, scarlet bedroom.
“Whatever you want,” she’d tell him. “Just use me for what you want.”
As the months went by her feelings deepened. She was in love with him. But he never made a sign beyond wanting company. And she never told him.
Yet she presumed. She imagined. She took for granted that he cared, too. The strength of the attraction was so rooted in her gut yet so beyond mere lust that she had expanded to be a shiny being, only lightly skimming the ground, joyful and delirious. Delusional was a better word. She saw in him what she wanted, and not what actually existed. Ignoring all signs, Baba had repeated her path to those red sheets, tempting and love sick.
We each have our own world complete within this little skin container of a body, and vast emotion --- happiness, grief, sensual experience, even boredom --- are all confined so totally within that space. It's easy to think others know what we are experiencing, but they don't have a clue. And likewise, what we see in their eyes and caresses may just be rote behavior, not the expressions of love and concern. Baba’s song came blossoming from the inside, but it was received as a noise, not an anthem of love.
“It must be you,” he said. The first of many short sentences, which in retrospect she found dismissive, but in present tense simply terse.
“Well, yes if you’re Luigi, it’s me,” and he followed her back into the café.
Four or five sentences followed --- something about weather, she asked if he wanted a latte’, no he didn’t and then he said,
“Whadiya think?”
She puzzled for a moment, then realizing that the conversation would be very short she said, “yes”.
And that was that.
“Baba,” he said.
“Huh?” she replied as he handed her a glass of wine. Then she gazed around the room. It was densely furnished with a wall of palms and tall philodendrons against the big window, a large bubbling fish tank, and an assortment of well chosen antiques and pieces with an Oriental theme. Big drums occupied the clear spaces on the floor and guitars leaned against chairs.
She drank the wine, she looked at his gray-brown kinky hair, the cargo pants, the sun-browned arms. He was a healthy creature with a New York City accent and the curt speech of a city kid.
Pointing to the bedroom he piped “Whadiya say, Baba?”
It was later, when she started searching for her earrings, exhausted and stunned by the raw jewel of Luigi in this small town, that she began to look at that room. The walls were poppy red, the bed of sturdy, shiny brass, and there was a population of oak dressers each of which was topped with lace and trinkets --- miniature tea cups, crystal votive jars, silk scarves with floral print. It had the taste of a Victorian bordello belonging to this spawn of Sicily and the Bronx.
“Beautiful, strange, and delicious,” she said to herself. “Very delicious.”
She snuggled down into the red sheets, covered her head, and slept.
Luigi sat on bed edge and sucked again on the pipe.
“You can’t sleep, Baba!” he said as he crawled against her, moving large hands around her body. “You can’t sleep.”
She made that little noise her dog made, the grumpy sound gurgled and ground from the back of the throat when it was foiled in it’s needs. He rubbed and stroked, ignorant that she was tired, too stoned to care. Finally he stumbled to the kitchen, poured cheap gin into a small glass, and went down a story to the computer.
Baba woke at seven. She always woke at seven. Light came foggily through a gauze curtain faced by a spiny plant. The thin, upright leaves fanned and splayed, looking like mislaid rays, fuzzy on the edges. Curled up a foot or so away, Luigi wore thin pajama bottoms and a t-shirt. He breathed heavily. Light footed she left the room.
Chaos greeted her in his kitchen. Every surface was covered with jars of food, new and opened; piles of vitamin bottles, stacks of mail, keys, corkscrews, all the detritus of a life seemed to bloom on those counters. Opening a cupboard door something fell and behind each door was a crowd, a multiplicity whose organization was based on much rather than availibility. Finally she found a glass. She washed off the fingerprints and drank water. In the fridge she also found abundance, spilling out, tumbling down, fruits and veges, beer and chickens, avocados, mangoes, at least three large pineapples. He certainly ate well, but how could one person eat so much? Taking an overripe banana as breakfast she cleared a drum off the nearest chair, sat, and sighed.
Then she began to ponder on their night. He had smoked, she drank wine, he stripped and she kept her red bra, the one with lace and bows. He began to talk. That night he talked through the Santana and on into the Allman Brothers and said,
“This is so real, Baba, look at you, just look at you.”
He talked like thunder and he whispered in her ear and at times he would grab her hair, pulling her head back while he held her with the other arm, immobilizing her above the waist. It was almost a fight, a tussle of strength, with legs and sweat, and then she squatted above him, then he pinned her into the mattress. She made her little sounds at first, the coos and mews that sounded good to her, but as they fought their way through the congress, as she began to lose track of herself, she became guttural with groans and gasps. As he talked he asked her questions. Baba had no answers. She had lost her words so she answered with an escape of air, a grin, a laugh, then snuggled her nose into his neck and worked her tongue down to his belly.
After the banana she walked into Luigi’s bedroom, sat, and softly told him she’d go home. He smiled, rose long enough to see her out, and returned to sleep.
Sometimes they went at night to dance at a brewery hosting a band. Sometimes they ate Mexican food. And sometimes he spread antipasto around the glass table with fresh mozzarella, anchovies, crackers, and raw vegetables. They’d nosh, drink wine, talk on light subjects and then once again he’d say,
“Whadiya think, Baba?’
They’d go into the lurid red room, turn on the Allmans, and wrestle each other in a game both would win. With nose to his neck she find the scents of red sandalwood and patchouli, in his hair there was cedar, and between his legs was the heavenly aroma of a natural man inflamed with passion. Her lust for him was intense. The crescendos were constant and she could feel the waves of moisture within, the gushing of her own overwhelming pleasure.
And Baba sang. She sang in cries, howls, and deep, inarticulate explosions. While Luigi talked, like a Cetacean she sounded.
“I love these sounds,” he said. “Sing to me Baba.”
She wrapped her legs around his neck, she tucked one over his shoulder and lowered the other beside his leg. She turned and tucked him from behind, then lowered herself onto those full, babbling lips. Baba opened her mouth and wrapped her tongue around his glans, drawing the tongue up from the base to the tip, slobbering over his penis and alternating from fast to slow. Like a warm, slimy piston, she used him in her mouth, caressing her throat with him, rubbing along the inside and out of her cheeks, with spit running off her chin. She nuzzled back and forth with her nose and circled the head with her lips, rolling it, tasting it, enjoying the smoothness, feeling the hairs along her cheeks, sniffing deeply for all the scents of him.
They counted their time by the musicians they heard on the stereo. Their motion was timed to the drums, the lamenting guitars. Candles fizzled, sweat salted the sheets, and Baba couldn’t count her orgasms.
“How many?” Luigi would ask.
“You count them, I am lost in feeling them,” she said.
Hanging onto that brass bed, tangled in a red sheet, Baba sank into love, into sensual, vocalized, raging love, and lost herself in this delicious, exhausting beast of a lover.
Each meeting was different, but each time he said, “it’s never been like this. You are amazing.”
And she would remind him over and over that “It’s we who are amazing, not me.” And he would say nothing.
Some days Luigi would swat her bum until finally “ouch” would stop him. At times he wouldn’t stop, he’d continue until she writhed away, turned to him, and laughed.
He once said, “I’m so pleased you let me do that .”
Often she toggled between lust and fear, not quite trusting how far the struggle would go, but she always met his strength with enough of her own to keep the war even. After there would be tenderness, “mush” he called it, almost mocking, almost begging for the affection she gave. And after her body would vibrate within, tiny fast waves of sensation would continue for hours, and eventually days, leaving her clothed in smiles and gasping in super markets, confusing check out ladies as she giggled to herself.
Luigi always ate like a starving man, shoveling and snapping. He fucked like one as well, but he wasn’t satisfied as quickly. And he would look down at her as though studying.
“How did you get to be this way?” he’d say.
“What way?” she’d reply, although she knew what he meant. She was beyond hot, she was frenzied, she was channeled into her senses and beyond orgasmic.
He’d try again, “What makes you this way?”
Lost in her sensations she had no reply, she could sputter an invective, she could chirp and wail, but she couldn’t explain.
And as the months followed, as the nights multiplied, the feelings built.
She wasn’t insatiable, that old image of the nymphomaniac. Each orgasm was total satisfaction, but in minutes, sometimes moments, a new need arose, the itch for satisfaction renewed itself, and over and over she contracted and then expanded into that blast of sensation. Eventually it was sufficient and she thought of her partner. He wasn’t bored, he was amazed, he was astonished. Each time he was that way --- wide eyed, but yet in some way an observer, a participant yet preserving a distance.
The end came brutally, suddenly. There was a night that she was in a heaven of pure pleasure. The flood of joy didn’t abate. She woke in the morning salivating, rolling her eyes, and with a delicious concentration of flames at her hips. She asked to see him soon.
“You choose the day,” he said.
But when the day arrived, he was cool.
“Nancy has come back, I need to think this over.”
Nancy? The Nancy who left suddenly and never said “goodbye”? The same lady who twisted his heart into pieces and heartlessly ignored him? He’d never mentioned she might return, that he could forgive the vicious departure.
Baba lay on her bed and ached. With a body electric and a mule-kicked mind, she whined and complained. She called friends and cried. Deep from her throat came the sounds of grief, loud and ugly, hard on the heart and isolated. Her billowing sadness streamed though her chest and she struggled with her root source, her sexual craving.
Luigi had never said he loved her.
“Mush,” he had said. “Baba is mushy,” were his words when she hugged and cuddled. Everything in her being spoke from her heart, her hands, her total willingness to do anything in that garish, scarlet bedroom.
“Whatever you want,” she’d tell him. “Just use me for what you want.”
As the months went by her feelings deepened. She was in love with him. But he never made a sign beyond wanting company. And she never told him.
Yet she presumed. She imagined. She took for granted that he cared, too. The strength of the attraction was so rooted in her gut yet so beyond mere lust that she had expanded to be a shiny being, only lightly skimming the ground, joyful and delirious. Delusional was a better word. She saw in him what she wanted, and not what actually existed. Ignoring all signs, Baba had repeated her path to those red sheets, tempting and love sick.
We each have our own world complete within this little skin container of a body, and vast emotion --- happiness, grief, sensual experience, even boredom --- are all confined so totally within that space. It's easy to think others know what we are experiencing, but they don't have a clue. And likewise, what we see in their eyes and caresses may just be rote behavior, not the expressions of love and concern. Baba’s song came blossoming from the inside, but it was received as a noise, not an anthem of love.
VI.
What is Love?
It's the lack of sustainability in that "love" emotion that bothers me. There is that grand experience, the genuflection of the spirit to the other, the offering of your will. But that can erode. One expects attention and maintenance, and that love seems dependent of a two way street of participation. And when this love isn't kneaded and watered, it tends to wither. Then one morning I wake to sour milk and there is a bit of this delicious equanimity which draws me neither towards nor away from my object of affection.
Obviously we've misnamed this emotion, and as far as I can tell genuine love itself is not an emotion. The one I question goes way beyond infatuation, it is passionate and swirls around the heart as though it is the product of the heart, but then is it? Or does this sort of feeling, the one generated by physical attraction, simply masquerade, leaving us devoted to the emotion itself. Perhaps all positive emotions should be as suspect as the negative ones.
So I'm in the process of teasing out the nature of love, sorting the emotional state from the durable part of a heart connection. Removing the stimulants that produce the wild, blasting ride is necessary to clearing the confusion. The lover goes away. Communication is slight. And the emotion, the one we've been labeling as love, subsides to a gentle warmth, that one mixed with respect and appreciation but lacking the fireworks that overwhelm in his presence. Then we are down to the kindness and gratitude we feel for our friend or dog, and only then do we give the lover the freedom he needs to be.
Physical intimacy so confuses us. It is perhaps the most complex relationship we have. In sharing our bodies, an act to which we give huge importance, we can become more involved in self and less in other, thus building walls where we'd hoped to tear them down. It's no wonder the monks retreat from sexuality. The puzzle of a physical relationship is confounded by a blindness that arises from personal need --- the needs of gratification both in body and mind, the results of which we tag as love, but which are not. As delicious as these feelings may be, they are simply one person seeking enjoyment from the body and mind of another person.
Monks draw a big circle around the word desire and designate it forbidden fruit. Like fruit desire has a nourishing quality, but the sweetness leaves a craving for more. Fulfilling your wants mostly leads to more wanting. And nowhere is this more obvious than with the act of physical love. When it's good, very very good, you just want to have much more. Yet the satisfaction is only temporary. And that's the core of the question. This temporary satisfaction is what we Westerners call "love". But what is it really?
While monks find their freedom in the removal of desire, I seem to have taken the opposite path. I indulge in desire and then seek to find all it's warts, it's rough edges and bumps. Withdrawing from worldly temptations only works for some people. Others choose the tar pits and tripfalls as they look for the nature of reality. We are really no different from the monks. We want the same gentle heart combined with an open sight. When the emotions arrive we want to greet them all with the same careful curiosity, not fleeing from them nor attaching to them. We want to learn how our emotions are not us, they are just feelings not much different from those our skin gives us about cold, heat, and pain. Humans simply overload emotional feelings with importance. But emotions ebb and flow and as the sun rises only to disappear at night, that emotion needs to be released to the empty place we call equanimity. This is the balanced spot where we find ourselves on a rainy morning when the milk has gone sour and the lover is far away and out of touch.
VII.
Women are from Venus, Men are from Hell
Women are from Venus, Men are from Hell
What is it about men? Men approach sex from the bottom up and women from the top down. The trouble is that some men, certainly not all, but some never get the true ecstatic possibilities in sex and just remain below the waist. I’ve had whole relationships with men who never got the love bit, even possibly a whole marriage.
There is this wonderful neural connection that runs through a human’s body linking the genitals with the heart. (It actually runs to the brain, but that can get temporarily disconnected.) There must be a little cut-off valve in men. Maybe it’s the diaphragm --- maybe women talk too much and engage it, or maybe they don’t say the right things.
In my experience if you tell a man you love him too soon, the next thing you see is his back as he exits the door. You have to wait until he mouths the words. Meanwhile, if you’re me, you use a full vocabulary of body language --- gentle hands, soft breath on the neck, moving against his body like a marking cat with velvet skin caresses. How many kisses does it take to teach a man that you love him? How wide the legs, how accommodating to his taste do you need to be to give that message?
My little dog rolls on his back when he lies beside me. If I don’t rub his tummy he nudges me or he makes these grumbling sounds, growling disappointment. When I pet him he knows that we are part of each other, he’s mine and I’m his. He knows we’ll take care of each other. I don’t have to say I love him, the body signals do that work.
The real difference is that when a man approaches a woman for sex he is saying “you can
please me tonight”. When a woman begins a sexual relationship with a man she is saying “you could please me forever.” So it’s a question of short sightedness in men. Maybe they don’t understand that love enhances sex. In fact, from my perspective, sex isn’t much good at all without it. Sex is mechanical, love is emotional, and the mixing of the two is a physical and spiritual blast that equals nothing else.
There is this wonderful neural connection that runs through a human’s body linking the genitals with the heart. (It actually runs to the brain, but that can get temporarily disconnected.) There must be a little cut-off valve in men. Maybe it’s the diaphragm --- maybe women talk too much and engage it, or maybe they don’t say the right things.
In my experience if you tell a man you love him too soon, the next thing you see is his back as he exits the door. You have to wait until he mouths the words. Meanwhile, if you’re me, you use a full vocabulary of body language --- gentle hands, soft breath on the neck, moving against his body like a marking cat with velvet skin caresses. How many kisses does it take to teach a man that you love him? How wide the legs, how accommodating to his taste do you need to be to give that message?
My little dog rolls on his back when he lies beside me. If I don’t rub his tummy he nudges me or he makes these grumbling sounds, growling disappointment. When I pet him he knows that we are part of each other, he’s mine and I’m his. He knows we’ll take care of each other. I don’t have to say I love him, the body signals do that work.
The real difference is that when a man approaches a woman for sex he is saying “you can
please me tonight”. When a woman begins a sexual relationship with a man she is saying “you could please me forever.” So it’s a question of short sightedness in men. Maybe they don’t understand that love enhances sex. In fact, from my perspective, sex isn’t much good at all without it. Sex is mechanical, love is emotional, and the mixing of the two is a physical and spiritual blast that equals nothing else.
VIII.
©Picottee Asheden
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