I Am Curious (Thirty)

May 9

He called at five minutes of three. I was still in bed. Why? I don’t know. This happens so often lately. I go to sleep around midnight and wake up every four hours or so, have a cigarette, then slip back down under the covers and pull the blankets over my head like darkness itself, snuggling back under a blanket of sleep and drifting off in dreams for another four hours. And there are days when I do this for sixteen hours at a stretch. God knows why, or how.

After a point it isn’t really sleep. A long waking dream. It just seems that there is nothing worth getting up for.

A memory — I had days like that in Eastchester. Days of long sleep. I guess it was a way of avoiding things. Housework, things I did not want to do.

I have none of those responsibilities here.

Then what? Sleeping the long sleep to avoid being awake and facing — what? The fact that I have nothing to do, arduous or otherwise? The fact that life is empty?

But is it empty? It does not always seem that way. It seems — oh, I don’t know.

But I have to write about Susan.

I bathed and depped and perfumed. Depped — the word I have been using inside my head. Used a depilatory on my legs and armpits. Went to him, clean and hairless and sweet to smell. He opened the door, looking quite dramatic — tight black pants, a black silk shirt, a scarlet ascot.

“Come inside, Jan.”

In the living room, Susan is sitting on the couch. The teenybopper, fluffy blond hair, a quietly beautiful little girl face. She looks toward me and tries on a smile.

This rattles me. We have always been alone together in this apartment, Eric and I. I know there are other people in his life, as there were others in mine, but all our meetings have been one-to-one. I look at Susan and am unable to speak to her, nor can I speak to Eric. I wait.

He takes my hand, leads me to her. “Jan, this is Susan. Susan, this is Jan.”

We manage smiles.

She is very lovely, at once innocent and knowing. I wonder what she might have been like at twelve, when he first had her. Or what she might be now if he had never entered her life. Or her vagina.

“Each of you,” he says, “is a gift for the other. I trust you will enjoy your presents.”

I look at him. He turns, walks to the door.

“I have an appointment,” he says. “Good-bye.”

He goes out. The door closes. Again the fancy that it is a dungeon cell door swinging irrevocably shut. I look at the closed door, gaze at it and beyond it for a time, then sense the girl’s presence. I turn, and she is standing a few feet away from me.

She says, “Don’t be afraid.”

“Afraid? I’m not afraid of you.”

“I thought you were, you know, uptight in general.”

“I suppose I am.”

“What he wants—”

Harshly, “I know what he wants.”

“For us to make love.”

“I know.”

“You’ve never been with a girl?”

“No.”

“That’s pretty weird.”

“And you have?”

“Well, like I’ve been with Eric for almost three years now. That’s a long time to be with someone like him. Catch me — someone like him. I guess there isn’t anyone like him, is there?”

“Perhaps not.”

“Anyway, three years. Almost three years. I guess there’s not much I haven’t done, you know, in that length of time.”

She extends a hand. I draw away. She frowns, hurt, puzzled.

“I just wanted to touch you.”

“I don’t like to be touched.”

“Oh?”

“I’m — this wasn’t my idea. The two of us.”

“I know.”

“It was Eric’s idea.”

“I’m hip. So?”

“Well — we don’t really have to do anything.”

“He would want us to.”

“We could tell him.”

She shakes her head slowly. “You’re what, thirty?”

“Twenty-nine.”

“To be that old and still be uptight about things. And you’re so pretty.”

“I’m not.”

“I’d love to look like you.”

“I’m too thin. Skin and bones.”

“Beautiful skin.”

“You can almost see the bones through it.”

“Oh, come on.”

I light a cigarette. As I take it from my purse Susan says, casually, that there is grass if I want it. Not today, I tell her. She nods agreeably. I offer her a cigarette, as an afterthought almost. She says that she doesn’t smoke. “Except grass, see. No tobacco. No cancer trips for Susan.”

“That sounds sensible enough.”

“Sensible. Look, Jan. Let’s sit down, have something to drink, talk a little. You’re afraid to know me. We look at each other and your eyes run away. You won’t look at me.”

“I can’t help it.”

“Why?”

“I’m afraid.”

“That we’ll ball?”

“Yes.”

“So?”

“And that I won’t like it.”

“Bullshit. You ever do anything with Eric you didn’t like?”

“Sometimes.”

“And you lived through it, right? No agony, no sweat. What you’re uptight about is you’re afraid you will like it. You have a head full of labels.”

“Of what?”

“Labels. You ball me and you’re wearing a label that says dyke. Total bullshit. Everybody is supposed to swing every way there is. Otherwise it wouldn’t feel good. And you even know all that, I can tell you do, but you’re trying to block it. The hell with it. We’ll sit on the couch and look at the fire.”

I am blocking. On the couch, the girl at my side, the fire glowing on the hearth, I make myself think long enough to see what I am doing. I am all tied up inside myself.

I think of David and Arnold. Of the openness of the three of us tangling together in love. Of watching one of them suck the other. Of the naturalness of this, of how my own mind took this in without blocking.

I can accept it for men. But for women—

I am afraid of it.

Susan takes my hand. Her own little hand feels so plump and soft. I experience the momentary impulse to yank my hand away but this is largely reflex, there is nothing unpleasant in the contact of her hand with mine.

“Jan.”

“Yes.”

“This is crazy. I almost feel like I’m the lady and you’re the girl.”

“I know.”

“You feel the same?”

“A little.”

“I’ll get us a drink.”

“That red stuff?”

“Eric left a bottle of it in the kitchen. He said we might want it.”

“I don’t know if I do.”

“Makes it easier.”

“I don’t know. What is it, do you have any idea?”

“He never tells me things like that.”

“Well, he’s a secretive man. I don’t know him at all.”

“Maybe no one does, Jan.”

“You probably do.”

“Hardly. Like in a way he’s the God that made me, do you know what I mean? I mean, what was I when I met him? Nothing. A little kid. I didn’t know a thing. Eric created me. But—”

“Yes?”

Tentatively, “Well, see, Jan, with all of this there’s still a part of me he doesn’t touch at all. You know, like, inside my head there’s still me, and it’s me and it stays me. I am not great at taking words and making sense out of them—”

“I understand.”

“Do you?”

“And I’m glad. I thought, oh, that some day there wouldn’t be any of myself left.”

“No, you always have yourself left.”

“Good.”

“He never takes that away.”

“Good.”

“Listen, that red stuff, maybe I ought to get it.”

“Susan? Do you want to make love to me?”

“That’s what this is all about, isn’t it?”

“I mean, do you want to? Not that Eric wants us to, forget Eric, but what you want. Is that what you want?”

“Well, yeah. Sure. Right.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“Oh, yeah. I would do it anyway if he said to do it. I jump when he says frog.”

“So do I.”

“So does everyone.”

“I know.”

“But I want to, yes, right, sure I want to. It is so great with a girl. It is so much better.”

“Better?”

“In some ways. Yes, better in some ways. Clean, it’s the cleanest thing in the world. Oh, wow.”

“You keep surprising me, Susan.”

“Only it helps if you love the girl. I think I love you a little, Jan.”

“Do you mean that?”

“I only say what I mean. That’s one thing, I never put anything on. I want to kiss you, Jan.”

“Oh.”

“May I?”

I have no will. I have odd presences in my throat and chest. I have a dry mouth and wet eyes.

And this pretty little blond girl reaches out for me like a phototropic plant for the sun, reaches out butterfly arms and a petal mouth, and I close my eyes, I close my eyes, I close my eyes, and our mouths meet.

A voice in the brain: There, see, it doesn’t hurt, it doesn’t turn you into a handsome prince, it doesn’t do anything but feel a little good. Except that it does in fact do more. It gives peace. It takes all the tension and sends it away somewhere out of sight and out of mind.

Her hands clinging to my shoulders, her head tossed a little back, her eyes half-lidded, her lips parted, curved in the merest shadow of a smile.

I think she is beautiful.

I want to kiss her.

We kiss, and our lips part, and our tongues touch. We slide deeply into a kiss, her tongue in my mouth, our arms around each other. Our breasts touching.

I am filled with a sudden longing to see her body. I want to look at her breasts and between her legs. I want to see all the parts of her body.

And to do what with them? To kiss, to touch, to — what?

She reaches out, opens a button on my blouse. I sit, legs curled under me, while her hands work idly, undoing each button in turn. She puts both hands inside my open blouse and takes my breasts in her hands. I have long since stopped wearing underclothing. Her hands settle on my bare breasts like birds on their nests, and I start to close my eyes but force them to remain open, and my eyes meet hers, and we drink each other like glasses of spiced wine.

“I am in love with you, Jan.”

“Oh, Susan.”

“Mommy. Sister. I love you.”

“God!”

We undress each other, slowly, lingeringly, with many stops to cling together in urgent kisses. I am kissing a girl, my mind notes. I am kissing a girl who is saying that she is in love with me.

Her body, revealed to me in stages, is incredibly beautiful. Skin like cream and honey, like warm living velvet. So rosy pink and clean. Breasts, beautiful luscious pears, and oh, I touch them, and oh, her nipples stiffen against the palms of my thin hands, and oh, she gazes into my eyes, moved by my touch, soft and liquid in her eyes and in her flesh.

Her pubic hair is a tangle of the finest golden fluff, neatly confined to her private parts, not sprawling all over as mine tends to do. I love her body, it is so clean and neat and precise, it has fresh little girl smells to it, I love it.

I want her.

And this revelation, echoing in my head in verbal form, is somehow far more shocking than the fact itself. The idea of wanting a girl is jarring; the reality that one is confronted by this delicious body, that one is healthy enough to respond to its appeal — is acceptable enough.

Life is infinitely easier without words and those thoughts which form in words. Animals fuck in the forest and walk away in stolid contentment without putting words to their actions. Only people need words, and only people have invented the sickness of civilization.

We should all fuck in the forest, like animals.

Nude now, both of us, in the bed, his bed. We have established, through words and gestures, that I am to lie still, that I am to be done to. I am to be the fuckee, the ballee, the suckee, as you will. I am to be soft and moist and passive, and Susan, sweet Susan, is to make love to me.

And so she does.

(Odd, this. I want to put down what happened and how it happened and what it was like. I feel certain that it is very important that I do this. That it is altogether fitting and proper that I should do this. But something stops me. As if this were private — and somehow more private than all the other private things which I have dutifully described and recorded on these pages.

(Do I fancy myself in love with this girl? I don’t think that’s it, and yet, and yet, there is something there, something between us unlike anything between me and, oh, anyone else. Does this mean in some strange way that my fears were well founded, that I have opened myself up to a possibility I dimly foresaw — what stilted prose comes today from this pen! — and that I am indeed a lesbian? No, no, nothing of the sort. Labels are nonsense anyway, and I’m not.

(I am, though, a little different than I was a day ago. Which is understandable, but which also seems in some way to inhibit the flow of ink from this pen.)

To press onward—

I lie on my back, eyes closed. She is partly alongside me, partly on top of me, and we are kissing, or more accurately she is kissing me, her mouth on mine, lips so soft, so infinitely softer than ever a male mouth could be, and our bodies are together, and her breasts touch mine, and our flesh merges all the way down. She is shorter than I am; when she extends her feet, lying on top of me like this, her toes reach to my ankles. I feel the contact there, and the joining of our thighs, and the sweet warmth where our loins do not touch, and the sensation of her pubic hair so beautifully golden, against mine, brushing me, and our bellies touching, fitting one into the other, her convexity into my concavity (or is it the other way around, I confuse the words, concave is like caved in, no?) and her breasts against mine, and our mouths, giving and receiving.

She gives a small pelvic thrust. I arch to meet it, and we touch.

It is like — I was going to write that it is like a plug going into a socket, but the phallic connotation of that metaphor is utterly wrong here, is it not? It is, rather, like the contact of two sockets, but with a great interchange of energy. I think that is what I mean. I am not too sure what I mean.

(Perhaps, Giddings, you ought to let the facts speak for themselves. Metaphor is not your forte, Metafor is not your phorte. Just give us the facts, ma’am.

(Ma’am. Who called me that? Oh, the schmuck with the snow shovel, half a hundred years ago. The connections, unbidden and unwanted, that the mind makes.)

Again and then again she works herself against me, works her pretty blond pussy against me, and then her body glides down mine, but moving so slowly that I would not be aware of the movement were I not so overwhelmingly aware of everything being done by her to me.

She moves downward, and rains kisses on my neck, and kisses the deep hollow of my throat. Her tongue touches the pulse there. She licks me like flame. My hands want to touch her but remain at my sides as if weighted down, as if nailed in place. She moves lower. Her hands are on my breasts and her mouth kisses their tops. She uses her tongue on my breasts, drawing wet lines from the outside to the center, starring each breast with lines radiating outward from the nipples. Each caress is not merely preparation but an act, satisfying and delicious, in and of itself. She spends a long time with my breasts. She becomes wildly involved with my breasts, and while her mouth and hands delight me and excite her as well, her legs straddle my thigh and I feel her pussy against my thigh, wet and warm, and she fucks herself gently against my thigh, so gently, that little moist open clam sucking at me as she rocks herself against me while she sucks my breasts, my breasts.

Oh, God.

I cannot recreate this scene. It hurts me to write it. I can summon up everything, every moment, every touch, every gesture, and I could fill this book all the way to the last page simply with the recollection of her progress down my body with mouth and hands until she magically reaches my secret place and eats me for months until I come like a star going into nova. I could write all of this and use thousands upon thousands of words and still not exhaust what I can recall. It is all still going on in my mind, it is all still happening as it happened then, but I cannot write it.

I must, then, summarize.

So.

She kissed and licked and sucked her way down my body and then she ate my cunt until I nearly died from pleasure.

See how much time and space we save that way?

But oh, oh, how fantastic it was. On a purely physical plane there should not be very much difference between being eaten by a man and being eaten by a woman. It is, after all, the same general thing. One’s eyes are closed, and it could be any disembodied head gobbling away between one’s thighs. There are few things nicer than being soundly eaten by a man who enjoys that sort of thing. It is best, of course, if he is either immaculately clean-shaven, or, praise God, equipped with beard and moustache. (Whenever I see a man with beard and moustache I find myself assuming that he likes to eat cunt, and is considerate of his partner. But I’m sure there must be some men who wear beards and moustaches because they like the way they look. Odd.)

A girl’s face is softer, and her mouth is a little softer, and that should be all the difference there is.

Not so.

How to explain it? How can I tell you about it, Mirror Girl, when I don’t understand it myself?

Never mind. It happened, it was divine, and I know as much as I need to know about it. Afterward, while I bubbled blissfully in afterglow, Susan’s sweet face lay briefly on the pillow of my loins. Then she came up and rested her head on my breast, and I put a hand on her back and a hand on her head and rocked her, cradled her, and she purred and told me she loved me, and I told her I loved her, and she purred some more. I patted her head, stroked that silken hair. Those earlier inhibitions seemed so utterly foreign to me now, just as her presence in my arms seemed completely natural.

(Once you jump in, and find the water fine, you wonder why you shivered so long on the bank.)

“Oh, Jan,” she says.

“And to think I didn’t want this to happen.”

“I was afraid you wouldn’t let it.”

“I almost didn’t.”

“We didn’t even need drinks.”

“No.”

“We could have them now. You don’t need it, you showed that much, so now it would be all right to have them just to give us that extra drive, don’t you think?”

“I think so.”

“I’ll get them.”

“No, let me.” She rolls off of me and lies on her back, eyes wide, smiling sleepily. I get up, then bend over to kiss her mouth. She tastes deliciously of me, of my cunt. I do not turn from the taste but kiss her deeply, my tongue working past her lips and into her mouth, tasting myself as I taste her. How good the taste of sex, of men and women!

(When I first learned to suck men’s cocks I lived in horror that some of their seed would be swallowed before I could spit it out. How awful, to spit out the essence of a man! Now, a new woman, I greedily suck up and swallow every precious drop.)

I leave her reluctantly, leave the bedroom, go to the kitchen. There is a decanter of the red liquid on the counter top. And two glasses. I fill the glasses. In the living room I stop to gather up my cigarettes and a pack of matches.

I return to the bedroom. I hand her a glass, keep one for myself. We drink them straight down. It is the same liquid he has given me before. The scent is of rose petals, the taste sweet and sour.

I set my glass aside and light a cigarette.

“Susan?”

“What is it?”

“I want to make love to you.”

“In a few minutes.”

“Would you like that?”

“Uh-huh.”

“I wish I knew what was in this drink.”

“Something kicky.”

“Some kind of drug.”

“Uh-huh. You really never made it with a girl before?”

“Never.”

“It’s good, isn’t it?”

“It is.”

“It’s not as powerful as with a man, you dig what I mean? No thrusting and heaving and everything. Nobody getting under your skin. Can you dig it? A man gets inside of you, he gets under your skin. Girls, it’s different, girls just get themselves together, like.”

“Yes.”

“I don’t know which is better. You were so many things when I ate you.”

“What do you mean?”

“In my head, like. The different hats you wore. You were my mother and my sister and my daughter, you know, all those female roles.”

“Oh, I see.”

“I tend to trip out that way. Role playing and sex. I’m a little crazy, I guess.”

“Who isn’t?”

“There’s a question. Nobody I know.”

“Eric?”

“I don’t suppose you could really understand Eric. Not you, personally. I mean like anybody.”

“Do you understand him?”

“Not for a minute.”

“You’ve known him a long time.”

“All my life, it feels like. Three years, not quite. More like three hundred years. I don’t know him at all.”

I draw on the cigarette, inhale. The smoke unaccountably makes me slightly dizzy. I breathe out, butt the cigarette in an ashtray on the bedside table.

I say, “What does he do?”

“Eric?”

“I mean for a living. Does he work?”

“No.”

“Did he inherit money or something?”

“I don’t think so. I think—”

“What?”

“He never said this, it’s just a guess, and maybe I shouldn’t say anything, so if you’ll keep it quiet that I said it—”

“Of course.”

“I have the feeling, it’s just a feeling, that he’s like some kind of a criminal.”

“That’s what I think.”

“Really?”

“But I don’t know what makes me think so.”

“Neither do I. He goes away on these trips. He doesn’t say anything, he just goes away. And then he comes back. I get the feeling that he steals money on these trips, or gets money illegally one way or the other. Maybe it’s just that I couldn’t picture him doing anything else. You know, he’s a man who when he wants something like he takes it.”

“Yes, exactly.”

“And I don’t think he would do anything respectable. He would never work for somebody.”

“God, no.”

“And he wouldn’t have a business. He’s not the type. I’ll tell you one thing, though.”

“What’s that?”

“I would never cross him.”

“No.”

“I would not want him to be upset with me.”

“I have the feeling, Susan, he would just kill anybody who displeased him.”

“He could do that, yes.”

“Without a second thought.”

“Don’t even say it, it gives me chills. I can’t stand that.”

“What?”

“Talking about that kind of thing. About killing or dying. The whole idea of death. I wouldn’t smoke a cigarette because of the idea that I might die of cancer fifty years from now. Fifty years is like forever but even that far off I can’t stand to think about death. And when you say like that about Eric, and I think about him killing a person, and then inside my head it becomes me that he’s killing, and it does things to me, it makes things happen in my head. Look at me—” holding out a hand, straight out, the fingers spread, and the tips it is true are trembling “—look at me, I’m actually shaking, that’s what this kind of talk does to me. Now that’s not normal, is it?”

“I don’t know.”

“To be that frightened. I mean you would have to be sick not to be frightened of dying, but to be this frightened of it for no good reason, that has to be a kind of a sickness too, right?”

“It’s something you’ll grow out of.”

“Do you think so? I hope so. Jan—”

I kiss her.

“Oh, groovy. Yes, let’s love each other. When that happens all of the fear goes away.”

“My turn, though.”

“Huh?”

“To do you.”

“Oh, we can do each other.”

“First just me. I’ve never done it, I want to, I want to get lost in you.”

“That’s pretty, to say that.”

“I love you.”

We kiss. We hug each other as if clinging together for mutual warmth and protection. (And perhaps we are doing just that.) She lies down and I kiss her mouth and her throat.

And her breasts.

And through it all one corner of my mind stands back aloof and notes all of this with interest and a measure of surprise. How extraordinary that I am capable of all this! How unexpected my enthusiasm for this girl’s breasts! See me now, curled at the breast as at another breast twenty-nine years earlier, eyes lidded, earnestly sucking.

When I crouch between her taut plump thighs and inhale her musk and taste her bittersweetness, it becomes something else again. For a time it is Susan I am loving, and then, somewhere lost in time and space, it is as if this disembodied cunt to which I pay homage is in fact my own, as if I am doing this to myself. I am at once giving and receiving—

(Hard to recapture this, hard to define. You say you were eating yourself, ma’am? With a spoon, no doubt. Unless you’re some kind of bloody contortionist, ma’am. Would you care to let us have that one again, ma’am?

(Never mind.)

I come while eating her, feeling in myself what I arouse in her. And we do more things, we find many things to do. There is nothing exhausting about this sort of lovemaking. We could go on forever. There is a wholly different rhythm to this sort of sex.

It is late at night when we finally agree to call it a day. Eric has still not returned. I sit on the couch finishing a cigarette, then drop the butt on the coal fire. Susan says we should not be seen leaving the building together. Why? But I do not ask this question. I go alone, and hurry back home.

Enough.