The Gentle Degenerates (The Vassi Collection)
Page 18
How many thousands of women had I so coolly appraised, forgetting that each of them has all the potential for the deep groaning passion where all meaning lies? And what did it take to transform a woman from a visual object and focus of a sex fantasy to an actual woman, with all her pain and complexity and singing need? The first night I fucked Carol she was simply a piece of ass, and I revelled in the discoveries I made about her body. When I cupped my hand over her cunt and felt how wet and hot it was, my first thought was, “Wow, I’ve got a live one!” And now, what would I think of any man who took Carol to bed and thought the same thing? The very idea of it makes me sick, and the contradiction clangs in my mind. Do I then despise myself? Given my obsessive nature, it would be awful to link up to it the need to suffer, and end with a compulsive masochism, a continual throwing of oneself into real and fantasy situations where it always comes up with blood in the teeth.
Now the jealousy began, and I prepared to do my penance, to pay for the sin of having enjoyed another human being sexually for two weeks. I began to imagine all the men she would fuck, the gang bangs, the rapes, the scenes of degradation. And in all of them, it was never the picture of her that bothered me, but the fact that her yielding, loving, wanting, and ultimately pure center was being filthied by this army of superficial bandits, plundering her cunt for their mean pleasure. Again and again I tried to insert myself into their place, but I couldn’t get away from the fact that by sending her away, I was condemning her to her fate, and I viewed with a brooding premonition what that fate might be.
Somehow it always returned to sex, the original sin, the means whereby we learn to differentiate good and evil and all the other dualities. Male and female face one another in eternal separation, striving to fuse, and dying in loneliness. Perhaps only those Japanese lovers who tie their bodies together and let themselves fall, embracing, from high cliffs onto a rocky shore: perhaps they know what ultimate union is. I have never trusted the mystics who claim to know unity with the Absolute as they sit on their asses in some posh cave, smiling to themselves. Union must be total, and that includes the flesh and blood and balls and cunt of the human being, not just his mind.
Now, after a lifetime of experience, after the bruising relationship with Regina, and the short, searing affair with Carol, I faced the same enigma. Why is it that the minute I begin having sex with someone, the quality of our relationship so radically changes as to make it a different kind of organism? Why, with sex, do freedom and respect and friendship so often go out the window? Why can I be happy for any woman’s sexual freedom, and have that same joy turn into jealousy the minute she becomes “my” woman? I had wracked my brain for years over this dilemma, and although I now had a wealth of experience to draw on, the problem was no closer to being solved. My only consolation was that I could now ask more acute questions.
Carol had come roaring into my life, a mixture of honest enthusiasm and a compulsion to run. Deflowered when she was four, subject to harsh beatings from her father, gifted with a joyous body and a sensitive clitoris, she had lived a Holly Golightly existence since she was sixteen. She could from moment to moment change from a hard, calculating bitch to a warm, efficient housewife to a near-nymphomaniac who had orgasms in her sleep as she lay there moaning and pressing her thighs together, working out in her body some fancy fleeting through her mind. On a few nights I lay next to her, my cock hard and my stomach in knots as I watched her gyrate and cry out, crushing her cunt into itself, yearning for some phantom lover, the one who would penetrate her once and for all, who would offer her the final humiliation . . . the man who would kill her. For she wanted to die, to be sacrificed. She was forever being ripped off, and letting herself be used by men who are little better than swine in their sense of scope and honor.
And I had loved her at once, a love laced with instantaneous fear of loss, for I sensed that she was a bird on the wing, following the wind to the north. For the first few days we fucked, I was still able to keep my center, to hold onto my perspective. I could keep track of all the many selves she was, and not get lost in any single one of them. To have done so would have been to reinforce one image at the expense of all the others, and perhaps substitute that bolstered persona for the actual human being, who was always mysterious, always changing.
But when the fucking got really intense, when I started to know her as a person and not as a source for sensation, it became impossible for me to maintain a purely phenomenological outlook. In the beginning I could look upon her love of animals, say, and her proclivities toward prostitution as equal manifestations in her personality. But after having tasted the sweet juices of her cunt, after having heard her gasp with pleasure/pain as I bit her nipple, having felt the burning need in her surge to me looking for completion, I could not remain partial any longer. I became defensive of certain aspects of her; I didn’t want her to go out into the street with her nipples showing; I didn’t want other men raping her with their eyes.
As with everything, there were two aspects to my change in attitude. On the one hand I became more attentive, more loving, more involved in her. But simultaneously, I lost the ability to observe her dispassionately, and slowly became embroiled in her inner drama. What was worse, I began to get tangled in my own metatheatre, losing sight of my own costume changes and sly use of masks. Soon a confused man was floundering with a confused woman, and we lost all ability to make simple contact, to enjoy the simple perception and presence of one another.
With that came a feeling of panic, for when communication gets muddy, the individual gets paranoid. We would go to bed at night, with everything superficially fine, and no sooner did the lights go out than the monsters started oozing from the walls. We heard noises, imagined men with razor blades climbing in through the windows, felt the clammy presence of ghosts. Perhaps a dozen times I would leap from bed to storm into the next room, there to confront emptiness and silence where I had expected some form of enemy. And return to bed, shaken, to seek comfort in her arms. And the step from comfort to sex is not a very long one.
That was strange fucking, the fucking for reassurance. Neither of us would be especially turned on, but the newness of one another’s bodies had not yet worn off, and the simple nearness and heat kicked off enough excitement to stir us. We would begin stroking one another lightly, with no more pressure than a feather might give. It was as though each of us were defining the outline of the other’s body by coming only so close as to let the electrical fields around the bodies mingle. It was like combining auras.
There was no desire in this, except perhaps a desire for desire. We wanted and needed to fuck, but it was an intellectual concern, something to be done to satisfy one of the the imperatives of the mind. The heart was not involved, and the body was indifferent. Soon the stroking would have its inevitable effect: her cunt got wet and my cock got hard. She would slide her ass across the sheet toward me, in what is perhaps the sexiest gesture I have ever seen. The sight of her young white body, stirred and hesitatant, coming toward me in order to make it easier to fuck her, is one that shall never leave the area of instant recall in my memory.
At that point it became a simple mechanico-chemical process. Her left leg goes up bringing the knee to her breast, her right leg stays extended, and her cunt opens in a maddening slant caused by the stretch of her legs in opposite directions. My cock goes for it like a kingfisher dives into a river for its victim. At first there is no great sensation, for she is not very excited. But the cock soon works its unfailing magic, and in a while she responds. The difference now is that she is not responding to me, but to the fucking that I am doing. We become quite impersonal, sealing our minds so as to keep our fantasies private from one another. There is no attempt to blend our minds and bodies into a double two-level synthesis which must take place if the hearts are to open. This kind of fucking is just her grunting her way through the levels of her tension to a cramped inverted orgasm, and me sailing blindly on the cur
ve of my long-awaited ejaculation until the sperm in my balls grudgingly stirs itself to shoot up my cock, out, and into the grasping cunt.
At one point she got tangled in the blankets, and I pulled them back, involuntarily covering her face and torso with them. The ensuing sight inflamed me, and I continued fucking her like that, with just her legs exposed, thrusting into the anonymous cunt, picturing her as the archetypal slut accepting whatever meat was flung at her. Then she threw the blankets off and turned her back to me. I fucked her from behind as we both lay on our sides, and when that didn’t get to the place I wanted to be, I turned her over on her belly. Immediately the act changed. She lifted her ass and I plunged very deep inside her. I brought my knees to the backs of her knees and urged her legs forward. She crawled up and then came to a kneeling position, her ass high and cunt hanging down totally open and exposed Her shoulders were hunched and her head lay at an angle to the horizontal of her torso. Her eyes were open and vacant, and with one hand she gently stroked my hand as it pressed onto the mattress, supporting my arm and my entire torso. The delicate movements of her fingers were like those of a child stroking a baby rabbit. I saw the child that was still alive in her, that aspect which only emerges as a kind of stubborness in her social role, but which blossoms in all its fragility when she is being fucked. And right upon that came the notion of her as a whore, lying in her bed, waiting for the stranger to enter. I am the stranger. I find this young and fleshy woman-child lying there, nude and uninterested. I begin to fuck her and she dutifully offers me her cunt. But halfway through, the flame stirs inside her, and she begins to give parts of herself that she would want to be seen by, want to share with, only those men that she knows long and well, who will be able to appreciate the deep, rich beauty other. But I, as the client, am brutal, and all I can do is to take a gleeful excitement in the fact that this whore is enjoying being fucked, indeed, wants only to be fucked, and can lie there exposing not only her hole but her inner life, as her tender cunt is blasted again and again by a demented cock.
I came up off my knees and supported myself only on my toes. This made it harder to bear the weight, but it gave me a very strong spring to my legs, so I was really able to launch myself into her. She felt the difference at once, and her mouth dropped open. It was as though she became rigid outside in order not to let any movement of hers distract from the hot deep penetration inside her. This was not fucking, this was civilized brutality. This was the male discharging all his hatred, using his strength to punish, to humiliate. This was woman in her role of vessel, accepting and nullifying the blast by using herself as a cushion, as a sponge, and while at it feeling those sensations and emotions which are only possible when one relaxes even in the face of sadism, and takes what comes.
All that came was me. I dragged the sperm up by sheer force of will, commanding it with the violent suction created in her cunt by my plunging in and out of her. She pushed back and took my bucking organ deep inside her, wriggling her ass so that the back of her pussy rubbed back and forth across the head of my cock as it spurted sperm into her. We froze like that for a long while, my pubis glued to her cunt and ass. And then, slowly, we sank onto the bed.
It was not long after that that she left. It was a chilly May day, and she was wearing the knit dress and white raincoat which had become a kind of costume for her. I remembered the first night I met her, when she was decked out like the Madwoman of Chaillot. She was so much wilder then, so much more actively crazy. In two short weeks, after the intensity of what we shared, she had become quieter, closer to herself. It was but a glimpse of the astounding woman she could be, once the fear and insecurity of being without a man to love left her. “I’m a very old-fashioned girl,” she had said a number of times. “I just want to get married and have babies and make a home.” And I believed that, for I have come to believe that unless a person is a true sanyassi, a wanderer, then a nest is necessary for sanity and survival, and the nest must be an organic unit in harmony with the countryside in which it is placed.
Part of my sorrow at letting her go was based on the idea that if we stayed together, I could help her undergo the sea-change so necessary to bringing all her pain and repressed memories to the surface, and letting them be burned off by a hot sunlight. But that would be playing therapist, a game I enjoyed when I was younger, but was always hurt by. Human destiny must be allowed to evolve, and any tampering is the most serious act. I did not have the strength or resolution to undertake to shape her life. I wondered if she would quickly revert to the role she seemed to need to keep her self-esteem. Would she become the professional scatterbrain, with all her genuine gestures spoiled simply because she held on to them a few seconds after the impulse had died, giving her an air of coy affectation? I knew enough of life to know that the most trivial behavioral quirk can change the course of a person’s development and fortune, often even more so than major influences like education and breeding.
I walked downstairs with her. A taxi came. She asked me whether I had all the addresses she gave me. We would keep in touch. Perhaps San Francisco together in the fall. . . .
I watched the back of the taxi until it was lost in distance and traffic. Then I went back upstairs, where the emptiness of the house assailed me. She was gone. I had accomplished what I wanted and felt like a successful engineer. But with the craziness, uncertainty, and fear, I had thrown out the warmth, the melting, the joy. I had disposed of a human being from my life. It is the kind of thing we have come to do casually with acquaintances and one-night lovers. And yet, and yet. . . as precious as I.
I went into the bedroom; the sheets were still rumpled and stained with our secretions. She was gone. I lay on the bed and felt the awful absence of her. A great burning began in my chest, and my limbs grew heavy. I felt like a lost child, and my lips trembled, and out of my pain-filled eyes I cried and I cried, weeping for all the loss that every human being is condemned to suffer in this brief stretch of breathing on this lovely, and dying, planet.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright 1993 by Marco Vassi
ISBN 978-1-4976-3275-2
This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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