Us
Like Us!
Lee, living in and watching my home in Tucson while I was in Jamesville, wrote me weekly notes; the one I'd received this morning read, "Think of us falling in love all those years ago while you're in Godwin. I'm nostalgic." Did anyone know me as well as Lee, have so few illusions about me and so much insight into me? I didn't think so. She was thirty and we'd not made love since she was nineteen. Who knew what would recouple us?
Faith had set me up in front of the mirror with my left leg held away from my right by a pillow under my knee.
July thirtieth, Part IV. My tapes, with few exceptions, fail me. July 21 I hoped that putting the recorder on a pillow would help, but I just listened to the tape I made and, yet again, it is often inaudible. Tonight I am balancing the machine on the right side of my chest and stomach, its built-in mike next to my mouth. Will it work better? This afternoon I typed a 6-page beginning to Part III about being dumb, then wrote five pages introducing [Faith] for Part I Chapter 2.
I soon fell silent. Outside my front windows, over which my blinds were discreetly drawn, I heard Ellen, Brian, and the girls arrive; as I listened to them walk up the front ramp I felt a current run through my penis and hand.
The Pattersons, away all day, have just come home. I feel their return and my penis lifts. It's ten. I look in the mirror at my face, then at the recorder on my body, at my hand covering my penis, at the green catheter emerging from under my hand. I look back to my face and I hallucinate.
The reflection of my body, then of my head, filled with wavy shadow; I felt I could leave my body and voyage anywhere but I chose to stay where I was. The shadowiness seemed to dissipate and I saw myself first with curly beard and hair, like Apollo, then as a bearded Neanderthal, fierce and low-browed. I spoke again: My face becomes other faces. My blood-filled penis jumps against my hand. I take my hand away and it jumps again, ahhh. Ohhh! I wordlessly took several deep breaths. I imagined Lee with me. Coming, I said, Lee Lee Lee Lee Lee.
There was a knock on my door and I fell silent, sure that I had not been heard. Brian opened the door and entered. During the day an electrician, a friend of Brian's, had been rewiring the Pattersons' apartment with equipment Hettie had bought yesterday in Watertown and given to me this morning. She'd left the electrical receipts in the Pattersons' kitchen along with an unrelated receipt for four boxes of books I'd had her ship to Tucson by United Parcel; Ellen and Brian had just found the receipts. I had not been heard but I had the tape deck on my shoulder and was still holding my hard-on, caught, flagrante delicto. Appalled and amused, I considered moving my hand to my side but decided modesty better served by leaving it over my erection.
When Brian was nervous or uncomfortable his eyes narrowed and he darted glances, but he was doing neither, was acting as though nothing was unusual or amiss. (Today is September 5, 1996 and neither Brian nor I, though we lived together whenever I was here till 1994 and still see one another, has ever spoken to the other of that night.) I too acted as though there were nothing unexpected or unusual in the scene.
"What's this doing upstairs?" Brian said, proffering a piece of paper.
"What is it?"
"I dunno. Just found it. I was wondering what it was."
I took my hand from my (softening) penis to take the paper from him. "I don't know--"
"I just found it."
"Oh! I know what it is. It's a receipt for what Hettie sent. She took packages for me to parcel post the other day and probably left this with the receipts for the electric stuff. Did you see what Tom said you should get? Did you talk to him?"
"No, I didn't see him. I seen him this morning a few minutes and that was it."
"He said there were three of one thing and one of another that you could get and put on, that you'd know what they were."
"Outlet covers maybe?"
"Yeah, I think so."
"Oh, he's done, is he?"
"Yeah, he's done. He said he's finished."
We each continued to pretend his being here wasn't funny. How would I write this? Would the tape that was still running be audible?
"Well good, good deal."
"Yup."
"Okay, I was just wonderin' what the Hell that was, thought I'd come down and ask ya.
"Had a real busy day."
"Yeah? Where were you guys?"
"In Antwerp. Played four games of volleyball. The guy that stopped here and looked for me, he found me over there at my brother's house. Partied all afternoon with him. Boy, he got drunker'n hell."
On his twenty-first birthday Brian had received a drunk-driving ticket on his way home from his party; since, he had limited himself to Mountain Dew and doobies, which he loved to burn. He didn't smoke while doing carpentry, did while doing most everything else. He started back toward the door.
"We got pot!" I exclaimed. I didn't want to prolong our conversation but had spoken without thinking. "We have new if you want some."
"Yeah, do you?"
"I think it's in the top drawer there," I said. I was guessing where it was; having brought the matter up I felt I had to offer.
"Jeez, I'll try a different joint. I've been smoking homegrown all day." It was not good homegrown, was so inadequate that he had recently fed half a pound to his pigs. "This drawer?"
"I think so," I lied. "Is there any in there?" There wasn't.
"This one?" he asked, looking in another drawer. "Washcloths," he said.
"No," I said, as though I'd just remembered that of course that was the wrong drawer. "Uhhh, I'll have [Faith] bring you up some."
"Okay."
"Okay?"
"Sure. Thanks. Good night Art." He was unfailingly polite as well as determined to make his way.
"Seeya," I said.
And he left. The tape, still balanced on my body, spun on. After I'd given the receipt in question back to Brian, I'd put my hand to the left of my left leg. It still lay there and, alone again, I looked in the mirror and spoke: I'm smaller now; softer. Brian stood by the bed and we talked; it was as though the tape recorder dressed me. It showed me, I imagined, to be at work, perhaps explained the scene as it would not have been explained some other night this accident might have happened. Brian was not among those I’d fantasized joining me.
I paused. Then, as the feeling Brian's entrance had lost me was returning, said: Let me write the truth, describe where in the depths I wander weird.
In the mirror the outline of my body, again detailless, was now filled with the peach color of the pillows against which I lay. Lee was again with me; she was kneeling by my side, a shadow, my Shakti. I see you here, I said to her. I wasn't talking to the shadow but was imagining I had given her the tape and was now addressing her as she listened to it. We'd been in love, then in love and trouble. I knew she still loved me and my love as I loved her and hers. In the flesh we might never again make love and, if we did, it might not feel as each of us would wish, but we still cared.
Here please, my clitoris, I said. I showed her, held my thumb print at the joining of my penis with my body. I'd never known on any given night with a lover what specific touch might please me. Now, I imagined, I'd found an erogenous spot on which I might rely, this place where my thumb pressed. I looked from my sex to my face. Peripherally I still seemed to see a darker shadow in the field of different shades and shapes of peach, and I now talked to this shadow-being as, behind and to the left of my head, the curtain moved in the breeze made by the fan. Right here. My thumb tip was pulled into me. I felt my seeming clitoris convulse and saw my penis lift.
_____
Lee was gone and my penis had softened some when Faith came in.
"I think it's working like this," I said, referring to how I had the machine balanced on my body.
"Yeah?"
"Yeah. Where is the microphone?" She showed me. "Oh, there?"
"There and there," she said, pointing to each end of the machine.
"Oh, good. Cause I'm talking right at this end."
I put the machine on the bed next to me and used the trapeze to lift myself off my back. (Listening to the tape today I hear the chiming of the chain from which the trapeze hangs.) I said nothing of Brian's unexpected visit, and forgot I had told him I would have Faith bring him some of the new smoke.
"Hit of pot?" Faith asked. (On the tape I hear the snap of her lighter followed by my inhalation.)
"Very good," I said. "Give me a line?"
As always, she assented. She went to my dresser and got the picture with coke on it from the drawer. (Listening to the tape, I hear myself suck the drug into my nose through a short straw, an aural image of debauchery.)
"Good one," she said, looking at the bare space where the drug had been. She returned the picture to the drawer.
_____
I was alone again, the recorder on my torso, and again with Lee, to whom I wanted to talk about Faith. Before Faith had come in this time I'd not intentionally stiffened myself for her as in the past few weeks I often had. I suspected my anxiety and dependence on Faith's acceptance of me were emotions familiar to certain (other?) pedophiles and exhibitionists who, like me, wished to do no harm. Lee would be interested in what I was thinking about what I was doing. She would know I didn't want to abuse Faith, and I didn't think she'd think I was.
I said: Lee, (a half a minute of silence followed) I am (and a pause as I, legs spread and propped apart on pillows, waited for the words) happily (waited for the words to come, the thought to form) unclear ( words that I would feel, or at least words that would not block feeling) about (and here came the longest pause since I'd begun, more than forty seconds--I clocked it when I listened) my compulsion (yes, it was a compulsion, more or less against my better judgment) to have--I look away from my sex up to my head--P. see me (waited for words) sexually aroused.
I'd been recording ten minutes when Faith re-entered my room. "Brian said you said I should get him some pot."
"Oh, right," I said. As she searched for the bag of pot and found it, I sang: "And--"
"Okay, see you," Faith whispered, meaning not to disturb me.
--there was no need for me to interrupt myself when P. came in the room.
"Well," I then said, matter-of-factly, "I do want to hear what's on this tape."
And once, twice, three, four times I (semenlessly) ejaculated, physical testimony to the depth of my desire the tape be audible; I was certain it would be. Simultaneously I doubted, thought it was too much to hope. I imagined Lee listening to it and came again, felt hot wet sperm spurt over my hand, grunted a 2-syllabled moan beginning low and going high, then, with a second clairsentient burst, grunted again and was silent briefly before a long, descending, sighed-out Ohhhh followed by oh God, oh God, oh God, oh God. Oh Lee, Lee, Lee!
I began again to sing: I put my thumb above the base of my penis. My body in the mirror had yet again lost its solidity, seemed but a mist, and now my face lost detail too. I loved to see myself dissolve. "Your mouth comes down," I sang to Lee. I closed my eyes; I was no longer seeing. "Your mouth"--my voice descended as she lowered her mouth toward my uplifted hard-on—"comes down. You take me in. Your thumb"[/red]--I pressed gently into the muscle above the base of my penis' solid trunk—[Color=red]"comes into me." And the tape ended.
Lee's mouth kept me hard. My penis was hidden in her throat, then revealed as she lifted off me; the hard shaft disappeared again as she took me in, and my thumb, which was also hers, responded to the subtle certain movements under it by varying its pressure on my clitoris; I felt Violet close round it, take it in.
Would Lee, if she were touching me as I now was, feel me receive her? I'd felt it many times. Had she? Did other people touching me feel what I felt as I touched myself? Before the miracle with Marjorie I'd never felt my hand closed-round like this. When I'd first felt her body enwomb my hand I'd thought that what I felt was happening in the material world. Eventually I'd found this wasn't so, that the vagina and womb that I felt suck and hold me were not flesh. It was as though, our bodies feeling love, we were enhanced; still solid, we no longer felt only solid but also what we were besides. Lee let me come, come on and on and on, her tongue gentle, her lips strong. Again she raised her mouth off me, her saliva shining on my stiffened staff where it belonged.
"Look," she said. The room was silent. I heard nothing but I knew what she was saying. She was looking into my closed eyes in the mirror, sitting beside me. "This--" she looked down at my penis, made me open my eyes and look with her "--it's mine. I claim it. I missed it. Look at me. You can't go away from me again." I looked up from my groin to where I had seen the shadow earlier. We'd been apart ten years. She said, "It's mine!" and iterated: "Mine!"
"I know," I said, aloud, speaking a struggle. "It's yours. I'm yours," and sighed and came again.
_____
To access the next part of LOVE NOTE, Chapter 13 part i, 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.
Edited by Coach, 16 July 2006 - 05:45 PM.
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