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Faith's hair the week she started working for me was lavender. The week I'd returned it had been green. Her eyes, green with amber flecks, were like a cat's, and she had a brightly colored tattoo of a fish on her back that she'd gotten at the local swap meet. The tattooer, who had been perhaps more drunk than he had seemed, hadn't given her the one she'd picked but the one next to it on the same page. His mistake still made her mad, but it was at least, she said, a fish, not something stupid.
"I want to get my own gun and do them myself," she said as we talked during chores on her first day. "I've done some flashes."
"What's a flash?" I asked.
"A sketch for a tattoo. Nikimo's are the best." I'd never heard of Nikimo. She knew much I never would, and I'd unlearned much that she was still to learn; she liked to tell me things I didn't know.
"The best tattoo artist in the country told me he'd tattoo me," she said.
She used superlatives a lot; too, much to her seemed weird and bizarre, herself included. The first time she said, "Silly me," I felt trapped. She seemed to be belittling herself by talking baby-talk and I didn't like it, but I was being silly. She trusted me, passionately, not to be as I was but as she imagined me; I knew there were limits to my being as I, let alone she, wished I were or felt I ought to be. She didn't expect me to be perfect, not really, I told myself, knowing she might not yet have learned that no one is.
Faith knew there was an enemy. She saw it in her natural father, who had molested her when she was still a toddler and now wandered homeless up and down the west coast; saw it in her pseudo-step-father Jock, who had also molested her; saw it in the various adults to whom she seemed invisible or, if visible, negligible; saw it in the blonde U. of A. co-eds, bubbleheads Faith called them. She knew the bubbleheads despised her even though they didn't know her. She felt no contradiction in despising them even though she didn't know them, and I seemed unable to avoid trying to say to her that she was categorizing the co-eds by their look just as she thought they were characterizing her and Throck and their friends by theirs. I wanted her to get it that a Republican insurance man might be wise and an angry poet or musician or artist a jerk and mean and foolish.
She soon felt she could talk to me about anything. "You're my psychologist," she said, "just like you were mom's." She told me that saving Throck's life by getting him off junk had saved hers. She also told me that I had helped her meet her mother as a person, for which she was grateful. "It was only in Santa Cruz that we started to talk. I really didn't like her much till then." She needed people who cared, who would stand by her, and she recognized that in me she had one.
I had asked Dorothea now and again if the liberties I took with her, the rare kiss or more-than-friendly caress, were acceptable. She without exception had assured me that she liked it when I kissed or touched her--not that she wanted me to do either more. She loved me more than she could say, she said. Each of us was comfortable with our relationship as it was. I'd been attracted to her, but I was attracted more or less to every woman (especially, it sometimes seemed--I deplored it, but resignedly--, ones in their mid-teens to mid-twenties), and I valued their freedom from my intimacies more than I desired their physical love. Much more. I wanted to be very careful with Faith.
_____
Still. I'd been doing lines and for the first time was having Faith position the oval dressing-mirror at the foot of my bed. My explanation of what I was doing had been vague and minimal.
"Tilt it down a little more, little more. There. That's good."
I was guessing at the angle. I also wanted her to put extra pillows behind my head and uncover me and spread my legs so I could unobstructedly see my sex; I didn't request it because I not only wanted to be exposed when she had left but also, I suspected, to experience the intimacy of her exposing me. My desire for the intimacy made me think I might already have crossed a line I'd better not have, and I hoped to notice if Faith either signaled or seemed to be attempting to conceal discomfort. She seemed unoffended and unthreatened and I guessed that to her my worries would seem quaint, but I was glad I had them.
After she'd tightened the screws on the mirror with it tilted at the angle I had chosen, I had her leave in reach a pair of pillows and the big blue-dyed sheepskin on which my legs rested when I was in my chair. That done she left, closing my bedroom door behind her, and, when I heard the back door click closed, I sighed, pulled myself up, dragged the extra pillows to me, and clumsily, laboriously, wrestled them on top of the single pillow already behind me. I then pulled the blue sheepskin to me and put it over the three piled pillows.
I lay back and looked in the mirror; my hips were too far to the left and my legs touched so my genitals were hidden. I pulled myself up again and reached down and to the right, hunched right till I could reach the far side of the queen-sized bed, then put my left hand over the edge and pulled till I had dragged my hips several inches to the right; that done, I again used my trapeze and took a sitting position facing the mirror.
Faith had left my bedside table between the right side of the bed and the wall and on it were my notebook, glasses, water, night pills, pot and a pipe and wooden matches, and my coke and straw. (I'd told her the day before that I sometimes used the drug and thought it dangerous, and she'd said she didn't use it and didn't mind helping me prepare it, put it out, or put it away.) I leaned on my elbow, did a line, lit the pipe and toked twice, put on my glasses, and sat up again in front of the mirror. I moved my left leg away from my right to expose myself, used my left hand on the trapeze to ease myself down until I was resting on my right elbow, paused, and then, still with my left hand over the trapeze so I would not flop down and cause my left leg to spasm against my right, lay slowly back onto my stacked pillows.
I lay on my blue-sheeted queen-sized waterbed. Floor-length ivory curtains hung from big brass rings attached to heavy brass curtain rods across the French doors to my right and, to my left, behind me, matching curtains on matching rods covered French windows. I looked at my reflection in the mirror and reached with my left hand to free my balls; I closed my eyes and rested my hand on my penis; I waited, and, in seconds, felt.
_____
I'd been in Tucson almost three weeks before I saw Estelle, one of my summer-fantasy lovers, a few days after that first night with the mirror. Estelle was about five four and strongly built with brown hair and brown eyes. She was studying to be a registered nurse and I was sure she would be a very good one--and that the greater the emergency, the better she would be. It was afternoon and she was sitting in my living room on the couch, a light blue futon on a spare wood frame. The futon couch was the only place in the room for anyone but me to sit and, except for book cases and a low long heavy wood coffee table on which were a television set and an electric fan, was my only living-room furniture. I needed open space in which to maneuver my machine and also found the sparseness of my furnishings in combination with the house's hardwood floors aesthetically pleasing.
"How was the farm?" she asked.
"It was good. Really good," I said. "It needed a lot of work, and it got it--a new roof, all new windows, all new cedar siding."
For four weeks in 1983, the year Estelle had worked as my aide, she and I had been lovers. I'd wanted our love-making to continue but it hadn't. Marjorie at the time was insisting that she wasn't in love with me and that I should not behave as though she were, and she did, in the abstract, want me to have other lovers; when I made love with anyone else, though, she was angry and felt misused. Estelle and Marjorie were friends, and Estelle knew that no matter what Marjorie said, she didn't like her making love with me; for that reason and others (including feeling sexually inadequate, she told me years later, truthfully or not) she'd stopped sleeping with me.
"I lost my nerve," she said. "I didn't dare."
"I was disappointed. You knew a lot I needed," I said; "we were good with each other."
I hadn't meant to count but knew we'd made love exactly ten nights in the four weeks we were lovers, once the first week, twice the second, thrice the third, and four times the fourth. Then, just when I had felt I was going to talk to her about my sexuality and tell her things I'd like for us to do, by her choice we'd stopped. We felt we loved each other, and didn't stop feeling it when we stopped making love. We accepted one another with active good will.
"It wasn't how I expected it!" I said of my summer. "I spent a lot of time doing sgurd with two married couples. Then, when they'd go home, I'd go to bed and touch myself sexually and fantasize, which was all new to me. I'd never fantasized much or been able to feel when I touched myself."
“You could feel?”
“It was amazing.”
Estelle had left home when she was twelve and lived on the streets of Seattle off and on till she was eighteen, when she had met her husband-to-be and gotten pregnant with her now 12-year-old son. Her sexual initiation was brutal, not sensual; she had been raped before she made love. Part of living as young on the streets as Estelle had was making use of men who wished to make use of her. Sex and love had only coincidental relationship to her, and even now, when she was thirty, I was one of the few men she'd ever trusted. I was not unmale, but when she talked of men, she wasn't, usually, talking of me. Sometimes when Jane or Nadine talked about how wonderful I was Estelle wanted to throw up, but I was as special to her as to each of them.
"I even made love with Anne a lot," I said to her, "you know, who died in the crash when I was hurt. I'd never done that, really made fantasy love with her. It's like we reached a new place. About time!" I said, and laughed. "Since I got back, I've made love once alone in front of my mirror. I'd never used a mirror like that."
Estelle liked me confiding in her. She knew no other man she could imagine lying naked in front of a full-length mirror touching himself. It was a womanly thing to do, she thought.
"I've imagined erotic experiments, too," I said. "I wonder if, when I feel a burst of heat in my hand or arms or penis, there's any measurable change in their temperature. Finding out has all sorts of fantasy variations."
I told her how I'd imagined different lovers with me as I touched myself, including her. I didn't explain myself as articulately as I felt I did mid-fantasy, but I did well enough for her to feel some of what I meant and she was excited by it, not sexually aroused but interested. When she left we kissed wetly and I slid my left hand under her shirt and caressed her right breast. She lifted her shirt and offered her breast and I kissed it, ran my tongue round her aureole, sucked a moment, took her whole breast in my mouth then let it slide away again, lingered at her nipple, kissed her on the lips again, then moved away. When she had left, the memory of her breast scented my mood. I'd forgotten how licking a nipple could make me feel and was startled how urgently I found myself wanting a lover. I’d given her a key to my house so she, like Faith, could come in without me buzzing the door open.
_____
Faith put me to bed about eight that night and set up the mirror. Again I remained covered till I was alone, then positioned myself for maximum exposure, lay back, and put my hand on my penis; again, in less than a minute, I was feeling. I moaned, eyes closed and awed. I could feel! It was love? I let it be, said, "Yes yes yes." I felt my hand pushed upward, as though my penis were stiffening, opened my eyes, and saw that my penis hadn't grown at all. I moved my hand away, then back and, eyes closed, lowered it. Again I felt an upward push as my erection seemed to swell. I increased the downward pressure and the upward pressure increased--mysteriously, since I still had not begun to tumefy. I sighed, time passed.
After ten the phone rang. In the past two hours I had imagined being with Estelle, whose interest this afternoon in what I'd told her had opened me to her quite as much as had her giving me her breast; I'd also been with Lee, with Dee, with Hettie, and with Anne. I picked the phone up in my left hand, which I had had on my erection. (Now, I saw, I was indeed erect.) It was Estelle.
"Just a minute," I said.
I transferred the phone to my right hand and balanced it awkwardly on my left shoulder where, barely touching it, I could hold it at my ear, then returned my left hand to my penis, which was already softening and lay centered between my balls atop my scrotum. I lifted it and held it firmly in my fist so I could just see its head reflected in the mirror.
"Are you busy?" Estelle said.
"Actually, I'm lying naked in front of the mirror like I told you about," I said, pausing several times before the sentence was done, the words not easy to find.
"I don't want to interrupt you," she said.
"I like it," I wanted to say, but if I did I mumbled it. It was the first time I'd actually tried to talk to anyone from within my new-found space; words didn't come as easily aloud, to someone, as they had in my imagination.
"Can I come over?" she said. "I'm looking at something I think you might want to see before it goes away."
"I could look," I said. "Especially if when you get here I can just go on doing what I'm doing and you won't mind."
"I don't care, I won't mind, but I thought I should call you when my friend came over. If it's okay, I'll come."
"It's okay. I want you to come. There's nothing I'd like more."
"I can't stay."
"That's fine, just come ahead. You can use your key."
After I hung up I pulled myself into a sitting position, did a line and a toke, respread my legs, and lay back to wait. She knew! I had found words this afternoon to tell her enough of what I was doing and feeling for her to be able to find me as I was--naked, erect, glasses on, reflected in the mirror--and know I was glad she'd come! My penis was stiff and nearly vertical less than a minute after I lay back and touched it. First I would hear her car stop, its door open and close, and her footsteps coming up the walk to the front porch; then I'd hear her at the door with her key, which I'd given her this afternoon imagining just such a scene. Inside my front door a left turn led into the living room and the rest of the house; a single step right led to my closed bedroom door. When she opened it, she would see my eyes were closed and feel no awkwardness in looking at me. And she would want for me to feel.
For some ten minutes after I lay back, about the time it would have taken her had she left her house for mine immediately after we had talked, I knew what I'd say when she arrived, but fifteen minutes, twenty, passed, and still she hadn't come. Twenty-five minutes after we'd talked I pulled myself up to lean on my arm, have another hit of pot, and do more coke; freshly inspired, I again lay back. Soon she would come into my room and find me with my eyes closed and my penis hard, know I was feeling and be pleased. She might pause inside the door, then cross the room, lean over me, cover my cock with her mouth, and take me into her throat in the same intimate spirit with which she'd accepted my caress and uncovered herself this afternoon. Or we might merely speak, briefly, and in five minutes she'd be gone. Even if that proved the case, I, I knew, would be throbbing with the pleasure of having shared my still too-secret space.
Several times as I waited, a car stopped at the stop-sign on the corner outside my house and I thought that she'd arrived. Now she was really here, and as I heard her key in the front door I stroked myself rapidly to increase my readiness. My eyes were closed as she came into my bedroom. My hand was under my penis, which was not so stiff it stood free but still was full.
"I'm sorry," she said. She sat next to me on the edge of my bed and fished a bag of pot out of her purse. "I knew you were looking for something special and I thought you'd want to know this was available."
I'd opened my eyes before she sat down. Now I removed my hand from my penis and, still lying back, took the bag. I'd been asked by a friend to get him some pot and had told Estelle. She'd brought a good-looking Indica but its characteristic strong skunky smell was tainted by a slight scent of mold. I asked her what it cost.
"It's a little high," she said after quoting its price, "and it's not perfect, but I thought you'd want to look."
"I'm glad I saw it," I said, "but I'm gonna wait." I handed the bag back to her and returned my hand to my penis.
"I've got to get right back," Estelle said, standing up.
I wondered why, when she had entered, she had said that she was sorry. She had nothing about which to be sorry. Before she left the room, she looked back at me. "I'm sorry," she said again, and left.
When she was gone I was able to still my mind and feel, not worry about her sorriness. Very likely, I thought later, as I waited for sleep, she'd been merely trying to articulate her love and apologize for not staying, but she'd had no need to feel apologetic. I'd not expected her to stay or to act any specific way. Had I been unclear on the telephone? Had I only imagined she understood what I was doing? Had I taken her for granted? She'd entered into my fantasy as I’d desired, and her willingness to do so had elated me. Had she been less willing than I'd thought and had I used her carelessly? Did she think she'd disappointed me? I knew a period of anxiety, felt guilt, was ashamed if I'd been rude to her, whose experience with men had not led her to trust them. I stilled my mind again. Eventually, I slept.
The next day, concerned, I wanted to talk to Estelle and say that if anyone was to have been sorry, it should have been me. I'd been unable to speak of my fantasies in Jamesville. I'd been unable to articulate them to Jane. Now, even after having talked to Estelle in the afternoon so that she had known what I was doing, my bringing the fantasy to life had gone awry. Had I, her friend whom she loved, undermined our relationship? Used her wrong? I felt I had been stupid, insensitive, carried away. I wasn't writing either. I thought about giving up my new-found fantasies and feeling.
Estelle came by in the late afternoon. I didn't know what to say, how to broach the subject on my mind. I tried, haltingly. Her eyes widened when she understood what I was saying. "You were beautiful," she said. "You're always beautiful. I love what you're doing." Life might be simple! Her love for and kindness to me suffused me. "I love you, Babe," she said before she left. "You don't have to doubt that. I love you."
_____
To go to the next section of LOVE NOTE click here.
To go to the THE HEALING & LOVE NOTE DISCUSSION FORUM click here. I want to hear almost anything you are willing to say, including whether you have had similar or contradictory experiences. Criticism of my behavior and beliefs is also solicited and will be (more or less!) welcome.
This post has been edited by Coach: 26 March 2006 - 05:37 PM
