How to Save Your Own Life (35 page)

 

The guests left. The coffee table was littered with full ash-trays, stained wineglasses, empty bottles of Mouton-Cadet, dried cheeses, soggy soda crackers, half-eaten petit fours, an empty brandy bottle, two snifters with little splashes of brandy still glowing golden in their bowls. “We don't have to clean up, do we?” she asked. “I guess not,” he said. “We can do it in the morning.”

She was tired now. Almost too tired to fuck. That was ironic, wasn't it? She went in the bathroom to splash her face with water and brush her hair and perfume herself.

“I'm not sure I trust Joanna,” she said, speaking of the people they'd spent the evening with. “She's really very tough, isn't she?” She was thinking that everyone was tougher than she was, more savvy, less likely to get duped, less open, more self-protective. Perhaps even he was—for all his sweetness. Perhaps he was really tough too.

“I'm not sure I trust you either,” she said, from the dressing room.

“What?” he said, hurt, put off.

She came to bed and looked him in the eye.

“That's a hell of a thing to say to a man who's about to make love to you,” he said.

“I didn't mean it the way you thought. And besides you don't have to make love to me.”

“I know I don't have to. I
want
to. But I won't unless you tell me why you don't trust me.”

All sorts of things whirled through her head. Her shattered marriage, her constant yearning for this man who doled himself out to her, making sure she knew who was boss, her tenderness for him, her fear of feeling so open and vulnerable, her fear of needing him so much. It was impossible to explain all this to him—even though he was kin to her, even though he was the man who understood her almost better than she understood herself, the man who was her best friend in the world. Even here, even in this closeness and tenderness they had shared for almost a year, there was division, a failure of empathy, the snake in the garden.

“I didn't mean it the way you thought. And if I explain you'll only misunderstand more. Sometimes I wonder if, under your sweetness, you aren't also somehow tough. That's all. It isn't important. I can't even explain it ...”

He looked hurt. “I wanted to fuck you,” he said. “I felt so warm towards you and so horny. Why are you building this wall?”

She didn't know. He got up and turned off the lights. He brought a pine-scented candle from the living room and fumbled with his cigarette lighter, trying to light it.

“To create a romantic mood,” he said sardonically. The candle wouldn't light. She lunged across the waterbed, leaving him bobbing in the wake. She fumbled with the lighter, inverting the candle, burning her fingers, and covering them with green wax—but not managing to light the wick.

“Here—I'll get another candle from the living room. Why don't you put on that great black nightgown?”

On one of their trips she had bought a bunch of silly underclothes to indulge his girlie-magazine tastes. There was a black satin corset with red ribbons and wide black lace trim, long garters, black seamed stockings. There were several filmy black nightgowns, one with pink satin ribbons under the wired bosom, which pushed up her breasts, until the nipples teetered over the edge of the black lace top. The nightgown was split up the front. She put it on now without the bikini pants that matched it. Her cunt was dripping. She met him again in bed. The candle was lit.

“Can you doubt how much I love you?” he asked, as if he knew not to pursue the other topic, trust, hurt, toughness.

“No,” she said. He was her love, the only man who'd made her feel totally womaned, totally entered, opened, vulnerable. Womb, woman, ovum, open, vulva, vulnerable. When he touched her cunt she felt as naked as the peeled avocado she had held in her hand earlier that evening.

“It's a flower,” he said, circling his fingers on her clitoris, touching the tender place just behind the opening, bending down to continue circling with his tongue.

“It's wet for you,” she muttered.

She didn't want to think about fucking or coming or fights or anything, but just of his tongue revolving on the crest of her cunt, of the slipperiness, the avocado slipperiness, and the rocking of the waterbed, and the ocean thundering outside. She bent to his penis and began teasing it with her tongue, darting her tongue around his balls, around the shaft, touching the skin, then not touching it, then touching again, until she heard him moan, as if she could draw speech and groans and song from his cock as well as sperm, as if she could make it speak.

Then he was sucking her nipples, molding her breasts where they swelled up over the black lace cups. She opened her eyes for a split second and looked at him sucking her breasts, this red-bearded baby with the huge hard cock, this man, this prodigious miracle, this wonder.

It was no good. All her feminism, all her independence, all her fame had come to this, this helplessness, this need. She needed him. She needed this man.

When he entered her, when his hot cock slid into her, she was moaning something about that, about surrender, and how ashamed she was of needing him so, of loving him so desperately. “But I need you just as badly,” he said. “I can't do this without you, I need you too.”

At first she was on top of him, sliding up and down rhythmically on his cock, while he held her clitoris between two slippery fingers, and pushed another finger up her ass. The whole world went out except for the throbbing in her cunt, which seemed to her like a universe, a galaxy, a deep black hole in space. She came the first time with a shuddering that made her scream and bite his shoulder. It was almost as if the orgasm was not only in her cunt, but in her throat, her voice, her whole body, and the scream was part of it, part of the release. He turned her over roughly but tenderly and began fucking her from above. And she thought, feeling that cock slide in and out of her as if it owned her soul, that if she died then, if she died that very minute, it would be all right, she would have known most of it, have lived, have felt it. There was more: she wanted his baby, their baby, she wanted to feel that pain, that pleasure, but still, if she died at this very moment, life would not have cheated her.

She was coming again. She told him. Could he wait? she asked. Could she stop moving for a minute? he asked. She slowed, she squeezed his cock with the muscles of her cunt, he moaned. His mouth was very tender and soft on hers, his eyes were wide enough to let all the darkness in. He rolled her over again, putting her on top, holding his cock very still, his hips very still. She was squeezing his cock with her muscles but trying not to slide up and down on it until he quieted down somewhat.

And then they both began to move again, interlocking, cock and cunt, and nothing else in the world mattering. She came with a shudder that shook her whole body and released another scream from her that scarcely seemed human. Everything released as she screamed and came; she also peed, and was embarrassed and apologized. “I love your pee, your farts, your shit, your tight snatch,” he said, digging his nails into her ass, and then he pulled her cunt down on his upraised cock like a glove over a finger. “Do you want my sperm,” he asked, rhetorically—because of course she wanted it, wanted to feel it spurt straight up to her womb, her heart, her fingertips, and he moaned and began to come, sobbing, shaking, crying, and she felt the base of his penis throbbing as all the filaments flew flew flew into her womb and hopefully caught.

They lay not moving in the absolute peace after the earthquake. She felt a small sun glowing in her solar plexus, and her legs and arms too heavy to move, mercury-filled moon suits, leaden limbs. He held her to him even as his cock grew soft and curled away from her. “I'll never leave you,” he said, “never.”

“Do you suppose,” she said, her voice hoarse from screaming, weak with love, “that many lovers felt this and then died anyway?”

“It doesn't matter,” he said, “it doesn't matter at all.”

“That means yes, doesn't it?”

He hugged her very tight.

They locked into each other
like brother & sister,
long-lost relations,
orphans divided by time.

 

He bit her shoulder
& entered her blood forever.
She bit his tongue
& changed the tone of his song.

 

They walked together astonished
not to be lonely.
They sought their lonelinesses
like lost dogs.

 

But they were joined together
by tongue & shoulder.
His nightmares woke her;
her daydreams startled him.

 

He fucked so hard
he thought he'd climb back in her.
She came so hard
her skin seemed to dissolve.

 

She feared she had no yearning
left to write with.
He feared she'd suck him dry
& glide away.

 

They spoke of all these things
& locked together.
She figured out
the jigsaw of his heart.

 

& he unscrambled her
& placed the pieces
with such precision
nothing came apart.

This is the sad bed
of chosen chastity
because you are miles
& mountains away,
over canyons, under jet-streams,
where the cirrus clouds streak
from east to west,
& the cumulus clouds
copulate to spite us,
& the hard cock of the wind thrashes
the bellies of planes.

 

We are not in flight,
& we sigh on our sad beds.
Three thousand miles apart
but memorized in each other's eyes & hips,
so full of each other,
we are empty to the world.

 

I could find a cock to fill me,
but it would never make me fly.
You could find a cunt to clutch you
but you would not cry
& bite her shoulder
wanting entrance to her blood.

 

So instead the whole country is a bed
in which we lie on opposite coasts,
divided by the obdurate mountains
of our obstinate love,
& wishing for an earthquake
to shake the continent,
& collapse us into each other.

This is the long tunnel of wanting you.
Its walls are lined with remembered kisses
wet & red as the inside of your mouth,
full & juicy as your probing tongue,
warm as your belly against mine,
deep as your navel leading home,
soft as your sleeping cock beginning to stir,
tight as your legs wrapped around mine,
straight as your toes pointing toward the bed
as you roll over & thrust your hardness
into the long tunnel of my wanting,
seeding it with dreams & unbearable hope,
making memories of the future,
straightening out my crooked past,
teaching me to live in the present present tense
with the past perfect and the uncertain future
suddenly certain for certain
in the long tunnel of my old wanting
which before always had an ending
but now begins & begins again
with you, with you, with you.

You are the first muse who came to stay.
The others began & ended with a wish,
or a glance or a kiss between stanzas;
the others strode away in the pointed boots of their fear
or were kicked out by the stiletto heels of mine,
or merely padded away in bare feet
when the ground was too hard or cold
or as hot as white sand baked under the noonday sun.

 

But you flew in on the wings of your smile,
powered by the engine of your cock,
driven by your lonely pumping heart,
rooted by your arteries to mine.

 

We became a tree with a double apical point,
reaching equally toward what some call heaven,
singing in the wind with our branches,
sharing the sap & syrup
which makes the trunk grow thick.

 

We are seeding the ground with poems & children.
We are the stuff of books & new-grown forests.
We are renewing the earth with our roots,
the air with our pure oxygen songs,
the nearby sea with the leaves we lose
only to grow the greener ones again.

 

I used to leap from tree to tree,
speaking glibly of Druids,
thinking myself a latter-day dryad,
or a wood nymph from the stony city,
or some other chimerical creature,
conjured in my cheating poet's heart.

 

But now I stay, knowing the muse is mine,
knowing no books will banish him
& no off-key songs will drive him away.

 

I being & begin; I whistle in & out of tune.
If the ending is near, I do not think of it.
If the drought comes, we will make our own rain.
If the muse is grounded, I will make him fly,
& if he falls, I will catch him in my arms
until he flies with me again.

I start my day when dreams are strangling you,
your eyelids flutter with the melon breasts
of women too enormous to be true.
You are fucking, muttering, loving in your dreams;
I am in a taxicab downtown.

 

And then you wake—and I sit down to lunch,
bored by another boring interview.
I interview the self I know by heart.
My luncheon partner interviews his dreams.

 

Meanwhile you pour your soul into your fingers
& type the night's accumulated dreams.
& then once more I find myself a cab.
The driver drives himself—thinking it's me.

 

At three o‘clock, I find myself alone.
You are running on a beach under the sun.
You are lying in the glare & seeing me.
I tap the keys to reach you through the clouds.

 

& then I go to dinner; you are home
writing to me & writing to yourself.
The two are one; we don't require carbons.
I feel your thoughts before you write them down.