Sensuous

25 March — Thursday

Another letter in my Post Office box. The bored housewife who wants to get a lesbian thing going. A whole word trip about how I am a voyeur because I can’t relate to men and a relationship with a female could open me up. But I don’t want to be opened up, you dismal dyke! Suggest we get together and have a drink and get to know each other. No need to have sex, but it would probably be good for us to talk about things.

Enclosed a picture. A facial snapshot from one of those booths where you get three poses for a quarter. A very hard-faced woman, wide jaw, bitter expression. Utterly uninviting. But that doesn’t mean anything. Nobody ever gets a decent picture out of one of those machines.

I won’t call her.

I will call Wayne and Maureen, but not before I type this.

Last night with Bill.

I knocked on the door and he called out for me to come in, that the door was open. I opened it and walked inside. The room was dark, with a small ultraviolet lamp providing the only illumination in the apartment.

Didn’t even see him at first. Then saw him on the water bed, his pale body glowing white in the black light, glowing fiercely upon the royal blue satin sheet.

He was naked and motionless. His eyes were closed. His penis was in repose, small and defenseless. It is so small when relaxed, less than a fourth of its size in full erection. Just a tiny unintimidating thing.

I closed the door and bolted it. I said, “Bill?”

No answer.

I walked closer to him, looked down at him. He was almost expressionless but when I said his name again he had to fight back a smile. This reassured me. For a moment I had thought he might be sick, or in a trance, or (except that I had just heard him invite me inside) dead.

I understood then. He was there, naked, inert, at my disposal. I could do whatever I wanted. Nothing at all, if I wanted. Or absolutely anything.

For a while I just watched him. Lit a cigarette, walked around the bed looking at him, butted the cigarette after two or three drags. Then took off my own clothes, watching his face to see if he opened his eyes. But he didn’t, his only motion the rising and falling of his chest as he breathed slowly and regularly.

I put my hand out and touched his arm. Just touched him. Then drew away like a child touching a live coal, then took a breath and touched him again.

He did not move.

I touched him, read his body with my hands like a blind man reading a face. I am trying now to recall how I felt. It is hard to say. Like an explorer, I think. I was touching another person, able to do so because of his passive immobility, and I was discovering the novelty of another’s flesh beneath my hands. That, I think, was the initial pleasure.

It became something else. After a few moments of touching him I became at ease with his body. I had not yet touched him intimately, and...

A particularly stupid euphemism. My touch was quite intimate, could not have been more so by virtue of touching his cock. I did touch him intimately, but had not yet touched his cock.

(Although I was not scared to. I was looking forward to it, but had simply not yet done so.)

At ease with his body now, with my hands on him, and the impulse to discover changed to the impulse to excite. He was passive and receptive and immobile, his penis tiny and limp, and it was my task to make that penis grow, to make it lengthen and widen and grow rigid as blood filled it, and to further provoke it until it disgorged its seed.

I took my hands from him and got to my feet. I stood at the head of the bed, my feet on either side of his own head, and I squatted slowly so that my cunt was positioned just over his face. He kept his eyes closed and did not see me, but I hovered over him like that, not touching him, and felt my own juices begin to flow. I stayed like that, not minding that the posture was uncomfortable, and watched as he inhaled the perfume of my sex.

I watched his penis grow. Just fractionally, adding perhaps a half inch of length. But I had done that. My smell had done that.

This dizzied me.

I straightened up, gulped air. Went again to his side and sat down, this time on the edge of the water mattress. My weight made waves and his body rolled on them.

I took his penis in my hand.

I played gently, gently, gently with him. The tips of my fingers on the smooth skin of the shaft, then rubbing at the different texture of the glans. I cupped a hand and took his balls in it and felt their weight.

Watched him grow, felt him growing in my hands. Teased his asshole with the tip of my forefinger. Probed at the base of the scrotum where the prostate gland is hidden. Gave his balls gentle squeezes.

His body remained utterly still. Only his cock moved, growing a little at a time, emerging from its sleeping self like a cobra rising to a snake charmer’s flute. I kept shifting position slightly as I stroked him, not squirming with passion but doing so deliberately so that the bed would continue its wave-like action.

When he was as hard as a bar of steel I began to jerk him with one hand while I felt his balls with the other. I felt his excitement rise, then deliberately changed the pace of my stroking to keep him from reaching his orgasm. The sense of power that came over me was enormous. I could excite him, I could diminish his excitement, I could do anything I wanted with him.

I lowered my face slowly toward his cock, moving closer until it filled my vision. I held one hand tight around the base while the other remained cupped around his scrotum.

I took him in my mouth.

Just the tip at first, sucking the velvet tip. As Wanda had done. And then, unlike Wanda, I lowered my mouth and let the hot hard cock slide deep into my mouth. Filling my mouth, almost making me gag, but I slid it in and out, my mouth jerking him as my hand had done, and the gagging reflex went away.

I cannot call all of the rest to mind. Cannot make the detail sharp. It was too immediate, too totally involving at the time for it to be properly etched in memory. I think it lasted for a very long time but I cannot be sure it was long at all.

Never tasted male seed before.

Wondered, when Wanda drank his gift, what it tasted like. What she felt.

Felt some revulsion. Almost took my mouth away just as he was coming, but wanted the experience more than I was repelled by it. Sucked him as he came. The taste — indescribable, but I remember it perfectly.

Liked it.

Didn’t want to swallow, but it seemed impolite to spit. Swallowed it.

Felt as though I had sort of come. As when I jerked him into Wanda’s mouth, but far more intensely so.

Felt like laughing aloud. Felt sinfully proud of myself. And proudly sinful.

I can close my eyes now and picture him lying there, glowing with satisfaction. I sat watching him, glowing myself, and saw his eyes open and the beam of a smile spread on his face.

“You surprised me.”

“Surprised myself. What did you expect?”

“Didn’t. Oh, a hand job, maybe. Or that you would turn and leave the apartment.”

“Did you really think I would do that?”

“Let’s say I conceded the possibility. How do you feel?”

“Good.”

“You have a natural talent. Unless you’ve had lots of practice.”

No answer from me. We don’t discuss what I have done’ or haven’t done. I have no past in his apartment. Was his suggestion a hint, an attempt to find out more of me?

Actually I yearn some times to tell him everything. But the yearning is never as strong as the compulsion to hide from him. To hide Arlene from him, and leave Jennifer a creature of present time.

“A drink?”

“Fine.”

I wanted and didn’t want the drink. I thought of it as something that would take the taste of him out of my mouth, out of my throat, and I did and didn’t want this to happen. I wanted to erase the taste and yet wanted to savor it, to retain it.

I drank the drink, sipped it, and it did not utterly wash away his flavor.

He talked, I listened. His talk was of other women. Things he had done, things they had done. I wondered as he spoke whether he was talking literal truth or whether he was carefully building scenes he thought would excite me. I was interested, as I am always interested in hearing sex talk, but it was not exciting me.

“Is there anything you would like me to do for you?”

I shook my head. “I would like to lie on the bed.”

“With me?”

“Alone. You can watch me. But don’t touch me.”

“All right.”

“Please don’t.”

“All right.”

“Something I thought might work and wanted to try. Call it an experiment.”

“Call everything an experiment, Jennifer.”

I stretched out on the satin sheet. Lay as motionless as he had lain for some time. And then began to play the scene we had just enacted, an instant replay of it in fantasy. With one change. My role was performed by Jennifer, a Jennifer who looked not like me but as I have always pictured her, a somewhat sleeker and more knowing Wanda, with higher cheekbones and no innocence in her eyes. I was the Jennifer in the fantasy. I wore her body but I was her. And there was a girl off to the side watching us. The girl was Arlene, I’m sure, but in my fantasy her face and figure had no definition. She was merely a voyeuristic presence.

As the fantasy took hold I began to move involuntarily and the bed moved beneath me. It rocked me, and while it was my muscles which caused the bed to move, it was as though the bed itself was moving and I was being tossed limp upon it. Rocked in the womb of darkness, rocked on the waves of my fantasy. Jennifer sucked him in my mind, and a faceless shapeless Arlene watched us, and the bed rocked me.

I did not touch myself. I did not move my hands at all. My arms lay limp, flaccid, Venus de Milo arms of which I was barely aware. I did not touch myself at all but let the rocking and the fantasy bring me unassisted to an intense, shattering, extended orgasm.

When it was over I waited a long time before opening my eyes. Waited first for the effects to wear off while I savored disinclination to meet his gaze.

We talked for awhile. He said it had been fascinating to watch me, that the image that kept recurring to him was one of a witch locked in sexual union with the Devil.

“What would you call what I did?”

“Call it?”

“Was it masturbation?”

“Oh. I don’t know exactly. You didn’t touch yourself, rub against anything.”

“No. It was all mental.”

“Fantasy tripping.”

“Yes.”

“What was the fantasy?”

“Don’t want to say.”

“Fair enough. I don’t think it would fit my concept of masturbation.”

“Is it better or worse?”

“Than masturbation? I don’t know. Did it feel better or worse? Do you feel better or worse about it now?”

“I don’t know.”

I just stopped typing long enough to call Wayne and Maureen. Funny. I thought it would be easy talking to them after what I have done with Bill, the changes I have gone through. It was not as impossible as my first conversation with him, the business of dialing the number and hanging up, all of that, but neither was it as routine as I had somehow thought it would be. I was nervous, had trouble getting words together.

Maybe it is new with each new person and you have to go through fighting the same defense mechanisms all over again. I’ll have to think about this.

No point putting down the whole conversation. It was Maureen who answered. I have a feeling this is not her name, because when I asked her if this was Maureen, her voice changed slightly and she seemed to take it for granted that this was a sex call. I wonder if they always use the same false names or if they use a different one with each letter, so they can tell instantly who they’re hearing from.

(That sounds too involved. I’m projecting my own elaborate compulsive furtiveness on others.)

Briefly — I’m meeting them Saturday at a cafe on West 72nd Street. I am to take a table in the outdoor garden and will be reading a copy of Swann’s Way. (Doubt I’ll be reading it. I’ve had my copy for years and never managed to get through the first chapter.) And Maureen will sit with me and we can talk. Wayne will be baby-sitting. If I want to see him too before committing myself, or if he wants to see me, I’ll wait there while she relieves him as a baby sitter.

Complicated but sensible. They must be rather experienced at this.

I think I’ll go to the concert tomorrow night.

A thought — there are hundreds of concerts and plays and lectures every night in New York, yet the only one I consider going to is the one on Barrow Street. Because I went twice. And thus am comfortable with it, and unwilling to try anything new in its place.

Same as being easy in Bill’s company but nervous with Maureen?

Enough.

The daffodils still look quite nice. I thought they would be dead by now. Bought them Monday and they still look good Thursday night.

If I could save some money I probably ought to furnish this place a little better. It’s comfortable, but it wouldn’t be hard to improve it a little. I sometimes think it shouldn’t matter as no one but me ever sets foot inside it. But all the more reason to make it perfect, as it is the only place where I am always perfectly alone.