Sensuous

10 March — Wednesday

We did not turn each other off.

I believe I started yesterday’s entry with that sentence, and then I lost the handle and started bitching about the weather. It’s better to do that, though, than to skip a day entirely. I have to make this diary an absolute part of the routine or it will become easy to rationalize skipping first a day and then two days and then abandoning it entirely. I must at least put something down, if I do nothing more than type the notation that I am in no mood to write anything. Or else this diary will fail its purpose.

Whatever its purpose is.

And whatever good it may be doing.

Something is doing good. Or doing harm. Something is either making my life improve or opening the gates to ruin. I am on either the right or the wrong track, and while I am none too confident which it is, or confident at one time but not consistently, I still think...

Oh, hell. Better to be on a track, for better or for worse, than to live out one’s life on a siding. Better twenty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay. Better to have failed one’s Wassermann test than never to have loved at all. Better to be rich and healthy than to be poor and sick. Better bitter batter butter biter bit.

Get down to it, dammit.

Things Bill is not: handsome, dynamic, charismatic. Things he is also not: disquieting, upsetting, nervous-making.

Things he is: pleasant in looks, voice, manner. Better- looking clad than unclad, slightly potty at the belly, skin white with New York pallor. The concentration on appearance is because one expects dramatic beauty, mentally endows him with these features on the basis of a telephonetic relationship. It was not that I was disappointed. Adjusted at once to the new reality.

And reality is the key word here. Yes, definitely. Eyes on him as he drew the door ajar, welcoming smile on his face, eyes blue and bright and alert, and he became real. Scary, that. Talking to him while seeing him, hearing him directly with no phone wires between us.

His eyes are his best feature, a benefit unexpected; the fantasy I’d evolved to complement the telephone voice had less reassuring orbs.

But the scariness of reality. We were together in his apartment and a drama was to be enacted, and unlike my midnight finger-thoughts I could not write this script. I could play a part in it, but only one of two parts, and one I’d have to improvise. And yet my part was essentially minor in certain ways. He had to direct this production, but it would fail unless he directed it along my lines, and I could not tell him my requirements; he had to intuit them.

And did so perfectly.

I want to reconstruct this and get it right. I’m tempted to leave it for tomorrow but each day the experience slips further into past time. The edges of memory are already slightly blurred. I wanted to type it out Monday night when I got home. It was late, and sounds travel in this building, and too I had already typed out one entry for Monday and one a day ought to be a maximum as well as a minimum. (Arlene’s Rules for Diarists, Ch. 3.)

Sat in an Eames chair in his apartment, a single very large studio room furnished as tastefully as possible considering its Playboy influence. Cunning lamps, travel posters, a large white fake fur rug. A king-size water bed, electrically heated to body temperature and swaddled in royal blue satin sheets.

He sat on a couch across from me. I complimented the apartment. He said it looked like what it was, a place to fuck in. It lacked subtlety, he said, but he was interested more in sex than subtlety.

And began talking sex. Eased in with brief mention of his marriage, a bad one which dragged on for the sake of the children, then ended when he couldn’t take any more of it. An affair which almost led to marriage on the rebound, then broke off when he discovered that what he wanted, at least for the time being, was extreme sexual variety. His sex life had atrophied during his marriage.

“I found I can make women happy, turn them on, thrill them. Something within me needs to do this. I can recognize it as neurotic, a hangup. Overcompensation for a virility anxiety. Need for the admiration of females. Granted, all of that. So I live out my anxieties, act them out, and the result is that I have a life style I can groove on. Getting older, of course, and fighting it the way every man fights entering his forties. Again, granted — but by God I’m having fun.”

Then talked about a woman he had seen recently. Described her physically, especially the sexual details. “She had a plump cunt. A skinny girl, almost bony, but a lot of meat on the pubic mound. And abundance of pubic hair, and very silky...”

I didn’t have to say anything. I could simply listen. He described a sexual encounter in detail, using all the right words, talking in very straightforward and matter-of-fact fashion. Just the right attitude for him to take, just the right way for him to have gone about it.

Called me Jennifer throughout. Does he think that’s my name? If not, he’s perfectly willing to go along with my game. Not even a hint that he knows my name is something else.

More conversation along those lines. Then, patting the front of his pants familiarly, “You know, this conversation is kind of getting to me. As a matter of fact, I think I’m getting the beginnings of a hard on.”

He looks at me. I meet his eyes, avert mine, then meet them again. Wanting to reply, feeling called upon to reply, but can’t form the words.

“In fact, I think this conversation is getting both of us worked up. You’re getting hot yourself, aren’t you?”

Of course I’m hot, but can’t say so. I do manage a nod.

Cunt throbbing and can’t even say so.

“And it’s more than the conversation. You’re getting me hot, Jennifer.” Touching himself more openly. “You’re a very exciting woman. Because you’re passionate and untouchable at once, and I’m simultaneously touching you and not touching you. You have beautiful skin. Are you the same perfect complexion all over? On your legs? Your ass? Your tits? Is your cunt hair the same color as the hair on your head?”

All so casual, so relaxed, and yet all so intense. Talking about his cock and its rigidity. Talking about my heat and my flesh, the heat of my flesh, the delicious heat of my flesh. Standing up, unbuttoning his shirt, taking it neatly off, kicking off deerskin slippers, unbelting his slacks and letting them drop to the floor.

No underwear. A shock because I had expected underwear and instead the pants fell abruptly and I was confronted with the sight of his erect penis. Fully erect, thrusting upward, engorged with blood.

I am at all times such a confusion of contradictory wants. I ached to fall on my knees in front of him and suck that magnificent cock. Ached alternately to have him grab me, strip me, rape me violently.

And felt an unbearable tension at the back of my neck from fear that he might expect the first or attempt the second. How can such passion and such fear coexist? How can I want what I dread and dread what I want, and experience both emotions to so great an extent?

He sat down. Talked about how he could feel my eyes on his cock. Wrapped his hand around the base of his cock and moved it up and down as if it were my cunt moving up and down around him, and he said that his hand was my cunt in his mind, and I watched him, stared wet-eyed at him, and my cunt felt — felt — as if that monster cock was sliding in and out of me, in and out, in and out.

“I want to see you naked, Jennifer. I want to look at your body while I come.”

I got undressed. Very timid but did it anyway. Fear was that I would disappoint him. Fear that he would look at me naked and see not Jennifer but Arlene. Watched his cock while I stripped, not only out of fascination with it but from inability to meet his eyes. Almost afraid to watch the penis, either; afraid that the cock would droop when my body revealed its Arlene self to him.

But it didn’t, and when I was quite naked I raised my eyes to meet his. Read excitement, joy in them. And stood and then sat down again while he worked his hand on his cock and told me how hot it made him to see my body. Talked about all the parts of me. How beautiful I was. How he could imagine his hands on my breasts, his mouth on them. How he would like to fuck me between my breasts and come all over my neck. How he would eat my cunt, how he would lick it and suck it.

(Heating me again to write this. Too much detail — I am indulging myself, heating myself purposely. I shall enjoy this again tonight in memory. I did last night. Unable to type it, I acted it out in bed and tore a sweet coming out of myself.)

“Show me yourself. Open up your cunt for me. Play with yourself. How hot you are. Play with yourself, I want to see you come.”

And I did all of these things. Staring at his cock, his beautiful cock, adoring it with my eyes, tasting it in all the parts of myself, I did what he wanted. Just as I felt it coming on, his muscles went rigid and he sobbed, and his seed jetted forth from him. Shimmering silver arcs like a leaping salmon.

How beautiful my coming, how complete, how divine. I reenacted it last night and will do so again tonight, but the memories are shadows of the event.

Edited shadows at that, as I rearrange the lighting to cast them where I wish. Monday his seed spawned upon the rug a few feet from me. Last night it took wings and splashed my body in fantasy. And last night that entire interlude was followed by true coupling, multiorgasmic fucking and sucking that endured for hours.

When in fact the aftermath was something quite different, and less the stuff that dreams (mine, anyway) are apt to be made of.