The Erotic Comedies (Vassi Collection Volume XI) (10 page)

"The enema," he thought, "our only hope is in the enema."

He watched, waiting for the sign that the treatment was complete. He did not know what form it would take, but had unmoveable faith that she would come out the other side of her heightened anguish and go on into a life of freedom. All the while she seemed to be in the throes of unbearable suffering, radical internal changes were taking place, and he could do nothing but wait.

Finally, a profound shudder went through her. She had come to the end of her metamorphosis. Her soul had been scrubbed clean and brought to its basic grain. She was utterly naked. A lifetime of overlay had loosened and now floated inside her. Her characterological tensions had been dissolved and there was no portion of her mind which was any longer unknown to her.

"I've done it," he whispered, "I've accomplished in a few hours what therapists take years to do. She is cured. I can see it."

At that instant, the woman let out a wail that was indistinguishable from the cry a baby lets out right after birth.

"Love," the woman said, "I want love."

The doctor's eyes stung with tears. The woman had contacted the core of her being and been reborn. His approach was vindicated. He took a deep breath, and with a sweeping gesture, he pulled the plug.

She gushed for an eternity. Jet after jet of water burst from her. She vibrated with the release of all her sickness, the literal and metaphoric shit she had been keeping inside her. The brown fluid splashed on the walls over the floor, ran down the therapist's raincoat, poured down the drain.

"Free," he shouted, "you are free," and turned on the spigot again, this time to play the hose in a stream over her body as he undid her locks and chains. She sprang up from the table, pulsing with the river of new life that filled her, with the cosmic energy that was once more a part of her heritage. He put down the hose and the woman stood in front of him, her face radiant with happiness, a blue aura shining around her head.

"I don't know what to say," she said, "everything is ... different now."

"I understand," he replied.

"I didn't realize how afraid I was. Not only on the table, but for my whole life. Afraid of everyone and everything. Why, I even used to be afraid to cross the street!"

She got dressed and the two of them talked in his office for a while. After removing his mask he proved to be a pleasant-looking man in his early fifties.

"Come back tomorrow," he said. "I want to take some psychological tests and tape your account of your experience. I'm going to present this to the world."

After she left, as he sat in silent enjoyment of his accomplishment, he heard a screech outside his window, followed by a hubbub of voices. Crossing the street bravely, the woman had been hit by a bus and was killed instantly. He rushed out. As he stood over her body a small tic developed at the edge of his mouth.

"It's always more complicated than one thinks," he muttered as he went back inside the clinic where he sat at his desk and began scribbling furiously in his notebook.

Yesterday's Iago

Neither could remember how or where they met; they assumed it had been at a party. But suddenly, they were friends, and from the first shared an intimacy and trust which went deeper than anything they knew with anyone else, including their mates.

They experienced that rare and precious gift of total communion. They could sit for hours, holding hands, speaking or not speaking, attuned to a communication which went from words to silence and back to words without an interruption in the flow of meaning. Unaware of themselves, they often struck classic postures, and one might find them lost in one another's eyes, their fingers intertwined, sighing openly.

Albert was a poet, and chained to his dry despair. The wife and two children who inhabited his days seemed something of an afterthought, a footnote to his central concern. He held a job to support his family, and went through the motions of relationship, but it was only when he was alone, a beam of light transforming his desk top into a stage as he hunched against the glare of the white sheet of paper that challenged him, his hand holding a sharpened pencil hovering like a hawk about to strike, that he felt whole.

Until he met Margaret.

"You are as real to me as poetry," he told her, and she wept with the joy of recognition.

Through the years they came to comfort one another in times of crisis, to celebrate in times of plenitude. At first they attempted to integrate the singularity of their bond into their wider social contexts, but both her husband and his wife began to seethe with jealousy even though the two of them had not know so much as a kiss by way of sexual contact.

"I'd almost prefer it if you fucked her," his wife told him, "then you'd stop idealizing her and imagining that she's all that different from me."

Margaret's husband left her, and Albert began to visit her at her apartment regularly, lying to his wife about where he was. "It's strange," he said to Margaret, "you're like my sister, and I have to sneak off to see you."

At first they spoke mostly of her marriage, her suffering. Albert was a mountain of support, listening, guiding, caring. And leaning on him, she was able to effect the difficult transition from knowing herself only through the reflection of another to having a sense of identity as a single woman.

And as that took place, of course, she began to feel her need for a man once more, but this time promising herself that she would not allow herself to be vulnerable, but would take what a man had to offer by way of completion, and give back as good as she got. For her deeper aspects, she had Albert.

In this mood, her encounters with men began to take on an odd twist, for she discovered that she hungered for bad treatment. Her husband had known how to be mentally and emotionally cruel to her, and it was, in fact, his disgust for himself for falling into that trap which had prompted his leaving; but she could not find the same sort of punishment with men who were essentially one-night stands. A shift took place, subtle at first, but with rapid acceleration into clearly defined forms, until she recognized her craving for physical pain.

She didn't want to tell Albert, for fear she would repulse him, but one night she could hold it back no longer.

"I think I'm a masochist," she said.

"You've always been," he told her. "We've talked about that before."

"It's different now," she said. "It used to be passive and unconscious, but now I'm an active masochist. I openly ask for it."

She told him about the previous night. She had been sitting at home, knitting and listening to music, when a great restlessness seized her. Her legs trembled and she found her heart beating quickly. She went out into the street like a zombie, heading for the nearest bar. It wasn't too long before a man sat next to her, a grizzled dockworker in his mid-forties who loooked as though he had been drinking steadily for the past thirty years. His very gruesomeness sent shivers of contorted desire through her, and while he was not cerebrally capable of formulating and articulating the nuances of the situation, his animal intelligence understood at once what was going on.

He grabbed her arm and led her out into the night. By that time she was quivering in anticipation and could barely stand. She dimly remembered lurching through obscure neighborhoods, and being half carried up a flight of stairs to his room. He flung her down on the bed and leapt up next to her. For a few moments he was pure frenzy, all the frustration of his lifetime pouring out on the willing woman who had given herself up to be used. He slapped and pawed and bunched her up, flinging her back and forth like a half-empty sack of flour. She could recall none of the details, only being aware that he might kill her, and not caring for anything except the brute energy that erupted from him.

"That's what I remember most clearly," she told Albert, "that I was sucking his energy from him, and I would do anything for that energy, even to letting him beat me."

"What happened then?" Albert asked, his voice calm and gentle, his mien serene, his attitude one of total compassion and acceptance.

"He ripped my clothes off," she continued. "And then it was sheer jungle sex. He had a cock like a policeman's billy, and he used it the same way, to beat me with. He didn't know what to do first, and he kept tossing me around in a dozen different ways, fucking me in the mouth, in the cunt, in the ass. All the while he kept slapping me and calling me the most foul names. And I ... well, I enjoyed it so much it scared me. I just kept shouting, 'Yes, yes, this is what I want, this is what I've always wanted.' "

She paused. "When he came, I dug my nails a half inch into his skin and he didn't even feel it. Afterwards we were both a little flabbergasted, and when I was leaving he said, 'I'm going to make believe this was a dream, because this isn't going to happen to me again, and I don't want to start wanting it, because you aren't going to want me another time. Your type, you'll do this a thousand times with a thousand different men before you're through.' And I knew he was right. He was so dumb and sweet and sad that I got carried away and I went down on my knees and gave him a long, slow blow job. And I loved it. Being in that tawdry apartment sucking that stranger's cock after he had practically torn me apart."

She looked up. "What do you think, Albert? Am I sick?"

He stroked her hair and held her head in his hands and gazed deeply into her liquid eyes.

"I've only had one criterion in my life," he told her. "Anything which can be seen as poetry is its own justification. If you view it as something ugly, then that's what it becomes. If you can sing its beauty, then that is all there is. And your soul is the soul of poetry. If you remember that, you are free to do things which would horrify the timid and the trite."

Then he smiled, and added, "But none of that should let you forget that one time you might meet up with someone whose frustrations lie deeper than your dockworker's, and you could very well end up tied to a bed while some maniac tattoos your body with a razor blade. Or even less dramatically, but more probably, that same man loses his sense of proportion and smashes a fist into your mouth relieving you of a dozen teeth." He frowned, lit a cigarette, and went on, "But the real danger is more insidious. The body builds a tolerance for any sort of sensation, and if you take this path, you will start to need more and more violent behavior to achieve the same levels of stimulation. It's like heroin or any other drug."

She lay with her head against his chest and wept silently. "You are such a beautiful person and such a dear, dear friend," she said. "You care so much for me, and yet you leave me absolutely free. You never censor or blame."

"How could it be otherwise?" he replied.

The more lurid of the possibilities didn't come to pass, but the last one did. While Margaret didn't fall into the hands of a madman or receive any scars or permanent damage, she did enter an escalating cycle of sadomasochistic activity. Like so many in that particular endgame, she learned the value of choreography and expertise. She came to prefer a man who knew how to use a whip with discretion and skill over someone who struck out blindly and in rage.

In time she was introduced among a number of the formal and informal circles composed of people who shared similar tastes. She was initiated into more delicate forms of torture, including the judicious use of hot wax, the proper placement of needles, the hanging bar and nipple clips. She once spent a weekend as slave to an entire household, being used and abused by almost twenty men and women for three days. And, in logical progression, she developed a taste for what were called, in that clique, water games.

"It was extraordinary, Albert," she said. "There I was, my hands tied behind me, having just been fucked by three men at once, kneeling in front of a fourth. He told me to open my mouth and I thought he wanted me to suck his cock. But when I took it, it wasn't hard. The upper part of my face was covered with a leather mask, so I didn't know what was coming. Then this incredible sensation, a stream of hot liquid on my tongue. I still didn't know, and then the taste hit me. A fantastic taste, pungent and sweet and bitter and salty all at once. And then I knew. He was pissing in my mouth! And it drove me wild. I reached up and put his whole cock inside me and let him piss down my throat. And all the while my knees were shaking and I almost climaxed with excitement."

She looked at him, wondering whether this outrage would perturb him at all. Telling him was a treat, for she was able to experience her episodes at another level, but from time to time she became afraid of alienating his affection. But he only nodded and said, "Unless the person has some disease, urine is perfectly sterile. It can't hurt you. In fact, it's probably safer then the city's drinking water."

"Have you ever done anything like that?" she asked.

"I'm afraid my sexual tastes have always been suffocatingly pedestrian," he told her.

They continued in that manner for more than a year, and one night he arrived looking drawn. She tried to cheer him up with wine and stories of her week's activity but he became more and more glum. Finally he blurted out, "Susan left me. She's taken the children."

For the first time in their long relationship, she listened more to him than he to her. And after long, long hours of his pouring himself out, exposing a weakness and sensibility to pain that he had never shown before, at four in the morning, exhausted, he asked, "Do you mind if I stay here a day or two? I don't want to face that empty apartment just yet."

The two days stretched into four, and the four into a week, and finally he left. It was as though he didn't want to go, and yet felt extremely awkward staying longer. Her heart went out to him. After so many years, she had a chance to help him, to provide succor for his hurt.

But he did not call her for several weeks, and she could not reach him on the phone. Finally, she went to his apartment, and found him drunk and disheveled, the place a shambles. She got him to shower and shave, cleaned the house, and made a huge dinner for him. Later, they sat on the couch and talked. It was the first time that she knew him without his having his wife, and the difference was palpable.