Chapter 1: June-October 1987. Part ii.

Marjorie, a former classmate of Lee's, arrived in Tucson several weeks after me. In bed the night after she arrived she told me that she had come because she had dreamed that she was with Jane and me and that we, Jane and
I together, had injured our finger, which she had then bandaged. She had interpreted the dream, she said, to mean that she should and could minister to us (bandage our hurt) by being my lover, thus easing my loneliness and Jane's guilt over living with Seth. I laughed, but she said she was serious and loved us both.

As the fall of 1981 progressed I grew increasingly aware that although Marjorie and I had become regular lovers--we were not living together--, my response to her was lacking. Yes, I was in love with Jane, but in the past being in love with her had not kept my passion from flowing with whomever else I found myself in bed, nor had being in love with Lee. I was promiscuous and, to an extraordinary degree, I trusted love.

"I never thought I'd find a playmate I could play with like this," Marjorie said. But that was later, after everything between her and me (though I was still in love with Jane) had changed.

"Did you feel that?" Marjorie asked me a few weeks before the change occurred. We were in my waterbed holding one another in my new Eighth-Street rental, three blocks from the one in which Jane and I had met, and she, though I'd not known it, had made my penis hard.

"What?" I asked. She guided my hand to my erection.

"Did you feel me touching you?"

"No," I confessed. She couldn't hide that she was hurt.

The next-to-last day of 1981, Marjorie had decided to risk our relationship--which she wanted very much to continue--by admitting to me that she found it unsatisfying. It was 11 P. M. and by Tucson standards cold, in the upper thirties, and we were walking home. A parking lot was on our right and we were about to turn and go past the twin 10-story University of Arizona women's-dormitory towers, always busy at this hour. Usually I'd have led us diagonally across the lot but, though neither of us had said so, we needed time to talk, were out in order to talk, and I had not taken the short-cut.

"You don't make me feel good," she said.

I meant only good to her and didn't deny we had a problem. "I've wondered about that!" I said. "I've been trying to think how to ask about it. I don't feel I appreciate you enough or give you what you deserve." My response surprised her and, as we talked, her heart eased. We stayed together.
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In early March 1982 Marjorie and I moved together into a new apartment, knowing that in two months I was to go alone to Jamesville. During those two months what was or might as well have been a miracle occurred, and the quality of my love for her no longer displeased me. Marjorie had prayed that she might heal me. She had wanted to heal me so that I could walk; what had happened was that I had come to feel.

The night the change occurred, we'd talked about my feeling deficit. Otherwise, it wouldn't have happened. "Sometimes," I said to her, "I'll feel my penis seem hard. But because I feel it would confuse you, unless I really am hard, to act as though I am, I don't. And by not acting that way. . .--

“I don't know. It's like instead of feeling whatever I can I try to feel what I ought. I'm reminded of what feminists I was reading ten years ago said about the mistake it is for a woman to think she should feel what men--Miller, Lawrence, Mailer--have written she should instead of feeling what she can.”

"I want you to feel what you can," Marjorie said.

"I want to feel your love," I said.

"You should," she said. "I pray for that."

That night I let myself feel, unconcerned that Marjorie would think I was responding to anything specific other than her love. I had not realized that before this I had been inhibiting what I felt, but because I now felt more than I had expected ever to feel again I realized that I must have been. We were using cocaine, a quarter gram between 10 P.M. and dawn. We'd used it other nights and it had seemed subtly to enhance my feeling, but this night the enhancement wasn't subtle. It was as though the drug had been potentiated by disinhibition. I seemed to feel her stroke my penis, seemed to feel it grow. "This is too good," I said as we paused in our love-making to do another line. "How will I stop wanting this this way [with coke]?" I was only half-serious but I was only half joking. Two nights later I said, "At last I feel your love as it should be felt, as you deserve to have it felt. At last I feel I'm good for you." My body had become an instrument of flesh and faith that she could play with love and virtuosity.

When, the night of the change, I had entered her vagina with my thumb, I'd turned it and softly, slowly rubbed the upper surface of the birth canal and then been still. Before I'd moved again her vaginal muscles had seemed to pull me further into her, not just my thumb but more and more and finally nearly my whole hand; I felt hot love juice pour over my hand and then across my wrist and arm. When I finally carefully withdrew I raised my hand to my mouth to taste, only to learn that the flow I'd felt was, real or not, illusion, and that though my thumb was moist, redolent, my hand and wrist and arm were dry. The hot fluids were illusion; that so much of my hand had been inside her was illusion; the love was real. I believed it real? Imagined it real? I accepted it as real.
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From 1982 to 1987 I used coke sometimes daily, for months at a time not at all. Making love with Marjorie without it was, disappointingly, disappointing, not that we often tried. During the last year she and I were lovers, 1986-87, I imagined us using a mirror, me propped so I could see and perhaps re-link what I was feeling with how I was being touched.

She'd taught me patiently through our early years of intimacy to be true to her, and I had learned, and, finally, found I was in love with her as we lay holding one another eight and ten hours at a time, pausing every hour or so to talk and do more lines. But, taught by her to feel what I could and trust it, knowing she was often unhappy and out-of-love quite as violently as she'd been--even on occasion still was--in, I had not understood how much, how often, how cruelly, she was sometimes suffering.

In May 1982 in Jamesville Marjorie, who to our surprise had followed me from Tucson, had what was probably her first psychotic-schizophrenic break, though neither of us at the time recognized it as such. As we were making love she of a sudden felt that she had been expelled from Heaven and as though she, literally, were falling. She was terrified. After the acute terror had passed and she had returned from the local Emergency Room, she had known that she was not in love with me. She had also known that, not in love with me, she must no longer be my lover. But after a separation of several months we'd come together again, and we'd remained so to varying degrees until, after time and again having seemed about to part permanently, we'd irrevocably done so when I left for Jamesville in June 1987. "We have to [not make love] again," she said to me on the phone that summer. "If we don't stop, I'm going to kill you." I was quite as sure as she that we mustn't go on as for so long we had. We never had played with a mirror.
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To go to the next part of LOVE NOTE click here.
To go to the THE HEALING & LOVE NOTE DISCUSSION FORUM click here. Has your genital feeling been affected by SCI? If so, how? I want to hear almost anything you are willing to say. Criticism of my behavior and beliefs is also solicited and will be (more or less!) welcome.