Dry Read

It is a dry read: as in not wet. I understand the metaphors. I have used them myself. I use it now as I drag myself back to the book that is all conversation and scant description. It is not moist.

Moist is a word that is associated with sex. It is all about the cunt. That damp, hothouse of a cavity that leaks viscous juices and comes in a flood I have heard although I have never been exposed to this in the flesh.

The thought of sticky damp is an aphrodisiac. The shelling and sucking down of oysters, the plunging of my fingers into the warm thick wet chemistry of wallpaper paste, all this is about sex.

I would be a disappointment. I am a desert of lust, a mirage of moisture, an incessant desire that has always needed lubricant, or at least spit. We read 'drip' or 'flood' or 'awash'. In porn the women become oceans. Wet as whales, slick as seals. I am stranded on the sand and despite my love of water there is not a drop for you do drink.

When she tells me about her trick - the dam bursting, the explosion of juices soaking into the carpet, I am aroused and slightly jealous and regretful of my missed opportunity to stand at the edge of the falls and anoint my forehead with the abundance that I seem to lack.

Little love

I fall in love just a little bit, even though I said I wouldn't do that anymore. I can't help noticing his quiet dignity. His kindness. His subtle humour and, forced to stand so close in such a cramped space there is the flesh as well, constantly brushing against mine. I try to love without lust but there is always lust. So lust, then, and just a little love, or quite a lot of love, acutally, and there is this melancholy brew for me to drink down, slowly, on a day drawn out. We say goodbye and barely glance at each other and my heart breaks just a little for those few people I have loved and had no language to explain the way I feel for them. Slow sad love, like a dance in time to the monotonous drone of the daily grind. Everything in it's right place except this little fragment of misplaced emotion that I have picked up like lint and curled into my hand with no place to rest it.

Two Weeks of Abstinance

I could have filmed the whole thing, the slow disintegration. It would have made a fascinating study into the human mind.

I was contained, imprisoned in a tiny shack, shivering with the icy breeze off the ocean. Somewhere out there there would be the slow ponderous passage of whales, a world of underwater silence and fish-eat--fish. There is comfort in knowing that the life cycle is continuing under the deafening tidal rasp. Eat and eaten, and therefore everything is in it's right place.

I am at the top of the food chain. I steam a small parcel of shark meat and I force myself to return to the chair. It is a marathon and I am delirious with the writing. I have pushed through the boundary between this world and the next. I am a fictionalised version of myself. I emerge from the pages of the novel and I feed and water and steel myself before plunging in once more.

The world I have created is dark and sensual. I dive in and it is as if I were in my own soul, dank water, dizzy with the claustrophobic airlessness of the ocean. I am on a writing retreat and I have set myself a target, 40 000 words in two weeks. No excuses. And because I know myself too well, I have banned the use of masturbation. I have become a monk, a cold turkey monk. There is a folder for pornography but I have refrained from opening it. I wake too early in the cold dark and the ocean calls but I will not go to it until I have written at least 2000 words. If I haven't' reached my target for the day, I will remove my privileges. No alcohol, no coffee, no food. I will be hungry for each word. Hungry mostly for sex. My self denial is complete.

I wash quickly, barely touching my skin. I sleep with my fingers prickling with cold above the covers. Like a recovering alcoholic, I steer myself away from any thought of sex.

At night I have no control over myself. I slip into the kind of dream state that I remember from childhood, dark pits of dream stuff foetid with the ferment of archetypal detritus. I am plagued by images of people I know, tongues and mouths, chaste friendships re-created by Hieronymus Bosch. I dream of him, in his suit, always in his suit, but I am naked.

He tells me to sit and I sit. He tells me to spread my knees, my labia, and I am all open places. I am the gut of a fish. He looks, standing in his pristine suit, but he will not touch me.

He denies me my pleasure and I can only watch his hand pushed down his suit pants, the shape of it stroking his penis that is denied me.

I wake to my alarm, early, dark, cold, and I would run down to the ocean and gulp sea-water. I am mad enough and desperate enough to do this, but there is my discipline, my 2000 words. I climb into the hug of my doona, banishing the last echoes of the pleasure that my sleeping body has taken without me, and then I sit down, chastely, and I write.

sorry

He falls in love in a second.

Love at first sight. The powerful kind of instant attraction that belongs in fairytales or golden wedding anniversaries or television sit coms.

"I have an attraction." he tells me, and I don't want to know anything about it. I want to leave and walk back to my own, delicately balanced life. I have the feeling that he wants to hold me as he topples down that abyss where the real world is just a small point of light at the end of a great echo.

I know what is down there, the place he is falling to. If we were in the ocean I would kick away, burying my head in the silence of water and I would leave him there to drown.

"I don't know," he has locked his fingers in the fabric of my coat. I would not be able to walk away without a struggle. I see the abyss stretching out as dark and clear as his stare. "It happened so suddenly just then, your friend, your beautiful friend. I am attracted to your friend."

Love falls like a hammer in the place of echoes that he is calling from. Love at first sight. Love with teeth and claws to rip that thin veneer of sanity from his fragile bones.

I want to tell him that I have been there too, that I hold myself back now. That I fall in love five times a day and shrug and let it go. I want to tell him that he just wants to be touched by someone, anyone, a stranger, but there is that awful intensity in his stare.

I step away from him, feeling his fingers peeling off my coat one by one until I have put a save distance between us.

"Ok then, see you."

And later in the evening we walk past the place where he is still standing nailed to the spot by the pain of instant love.

The Dance.

It was the three of us together, but she just held his hand and sang and watched as I helped him rid himself of his innocence. Everything so gentle. He was coddled into a kind of sexual awakening. We were his friends. I was, perhaps his best friend. We had slept on a mattress on the floor and I had listened to him on so many occasions.

"Could I be gay? What if I'm gay? How will I know if I'm gay?"

How will you know for sure unless you sample every option, any option. I had tired of his perpetual virginity. He was the yin to my yang.

"How do they do it? Gay men? What are the machinations of the act?"

He listened to my detailed explanations and he groaned.

"See I don't know if I can do that."

"You don't have to do that."

"Well what will I do then? Tell me what I should do?"

We put the music on that he would like. We fed him. I had slept with her before and together we lay on the same mattress and listened to the same hopes and fears.

"What if I am? What if I'm not? What am I then? What if I am nothing or everything or if I will never have the opportunity to make a choice."

We did it without speaking. There was no planning, no signal, no negotiation. We stripped him of his clothes and when he was naked there was only the music, and our hands, and her humming. It was like a dance, which was something we were all comfortable with. We had danced together many times. This naked dance, and his erection, bouncing it's questions between us.

I kissed him in silence. I kissed his penis and there was music to regulate my rise and fall. When the music stopped we froze, all three of us, as if we were just children playing games. The first note of a new song and I relaxed onto him, took him into my body. This first time, gently.

It was a moment of grace between us. The last moment. Years later we would intimate that we both knew what had happened between us.

He came, and I swallowed gently, careful not to frighten him. He would need to base his ultimate decision on what had occurred between us on that night. He stroked my hair. I noticed the sideways curl of his penis, the coy turning away from me, and wondered if this was always the way with him, or if he had tucked it too tightly and the curl was just the memory of a comforting dressing to the left.

We kissed, the three of us, and later, when he had gone, we mentioned the delicate curl of his penis. I had never seen one like that before. I seemed to be always retreating from my touch like a frightened animal.

He liked boys. It was decided. He walked away from us into a brilliant career and never once looked back. I was momentarily disturbed by this. I felt abandoned. We had been constant companions, but there would be others. There are always others.

She and I joked that he liked my head job so much that he never slept with a girl again, and then we quarrelled, this girl and I, and she never slept with a girl again and I was left to wonder why I was always their first, and always their last.

In the lift

In the lift with the two Japanese girls, and I am hideous. I am skulking behind them and all the hair on the skin of their necks are highlighted in flourescent gold. I am the creature to be hunted down, frankenstein built. I watch the fur on the soft white collar of one of the girls. I watch the neck and it's light fur. I see the coy downward cast of eyes that are fringed by the most exquisitely dark lashes, deer like. And they are so thin. I could catch them up each in the crook of one arm. I could bundle them together and carry them without effort.

At school I dreaded any kind of sport because the girls would race into the showers, peeling away their privacy, exposing their flesh to the monster in their midst. Then there is the sauna. I have been but I don't like the uncomfortable closeness of other people's flesh. It is as if my body will betray me, sprouting an erection like a pointing finger, a flag to mark the place of greatest disturbance.

So in the lift I breathe more shallowly. I can smell the pleasant cherry scent of their flesh. We climb too slowly. This is like a scene from a movie. Look out! Turn around! He's behind you!

The doors open with a gasp of relief. One of them, the one with the fur lined jacket, turns and bows and thanks me although I have done nothing. Thank you for not acting on your impulses perhaps. Thank you for remaining at a respectful distance.

"Thank you" she says and the doors close and I the beast is once more contained.

first girl

So I wondered how I would appear in comparison. Less beautiful, less feminine, less. Generally less.

In the wild a female animal will mate with another female to make sure that her place in the pecking order is secure. Maybe I slept with her because she seemed so worldly, younger than me, perhaps, but more experienced. And when I was up close there was just the taste and texture of her, the idea that there was more to her, my hand, half disappearing inside her, my tongue, pushing as far as I could manage. The idea that somewhere inside her there would be something of myself, my feminine side, somehow buried inside her skin.

I found that I was shaking. I could not still my hand. It was the smell of her, the taste, my tongue thick with her viscosity. The back of my palate tingling with a strange new and not unpleasant taste. The pungent smell of her on my fingers, the sudden urge to push too hard, to enter her completely, to climb inside her.

I felt the lack of whatever it was I would need to enter her. I thought of Freud and how he would be proud of this kind of penis envy. I wanted to be inside her in a way that men had been inside her. I ached with the need to enter her. This would be the first of many nights of longing. I have grown used to this.