& become, for instance, an orgy
It was like I was looking at a scene from one of those envellumed Renaissance prints – the secret kind known only to the pervert connoisseur, with giant muscles and endraped beds. Had I ever thought about it, this word orgy would have been something very different, belonging to other ages, a time of swingers clubs and plumed moustaches, with a softcore piano score. But maybe the fact that this was so different was because this is no more the time of swingers clubs than a time when things are really obscene. As soon as you’re in bed with someone you can do anything you like, that’s the basic arrangement nowadays – there is no disgust or danger. Maybe that was why the scene before me was so peaceful and so different from my previous assumptions, and maybe this is true for so many words, for most words we happily use are in fact outmoded, or exaggerations. If the atmosphere was crazed, it did not seem that way. Whereas now, from this distance, when everything has disappeared, I wonder if I should have thought about it more. For the problem with happiness is how often it requires the cooperation of other people, and it’s never clear if they’re cooperating for the right reasons, by which I mean the same reasons. Sure, everyone has their reasons, as the swami has it. But the fact that there are overlapping reasons in a situation is no guarantee at all that the consequences will be overlapping, too. But at the time I was not thinking with such detachment. Instead I was just marvelling how different things were from how I ever imagined them, and I liked that discovery very much. This orgy was quiet and industrious, a whole you wanna take over or – no no, I’m cool, you cool? – no problem, let’s stay like this – that salon talk, just kindly and methodical. I liked it, the way people were considerate of each other. They’d get up for water and sit around chatting and sometimes just take over for a little, if someone needed a break from licking, or kissing. It was charming, the way people went about it. It’s so easy, I was thinking, to multiply yourself. I was the same person who had arrived at this party; the self in me was the same. This is not a surprising situation and happens very often. But now inside that self, occupying the space which earlier had only the haziest notion of how the word orgy might have been fulfilled, there were these two naked kids just shyly or lazily kissing in the most laid-back way, and a cigarette that the girl had put aside was unravelling itself unnoticed in an ashtray. And perhaps if it had just been this, a general escalation of a blissful vibe, then I could probably have accepted it. But this was to ignore the fact that an orgy among people with whom you have many secrets is a difficult social encounter. I did not blame Hiro for this. If Hiro was sweet then he was sweet like the most catastrophic kitten. If now he does perhaps seem to me like one of those space invader demons leaking down poison in pixels, it’s not as if those pixels were luminously visible. I was very sure that Hiro had no malice in him, but still, it made me wonder if therefore I should have considered much more carefully the issue of Hiro’s pills, e.g. the issue of whether his sporadic taking of the medical pills that were said to stabilise or ameliorate his general condition was in fact as useful for the common good as Hiro always maintained. There was no time, however, to consider this, I had to consider it only in retrospect, when it was in a way too late, when whether or not Hiro’s manic behaviour was a danger had been proved beyond all measure.
surprisingly social
For what was happening in front of me in this the present moment was that Romy and Epstein were naked too – or at least Epstein was, and Romy was let’s say topless. She came over to nakedly smoke a cigarette with Candy and me so I began a balanced conversation, one of those casual phrases like, oh I don’t know, like Romy, what the fuck? There was a vein on one of her breasts I could see, and as ever I considered how odd it was that nakedness feels like such an extensive knowledge, that even if one has seen a person naked already their nakedness is always an event, and it was an event – the way Romy’s breasts were there. So I just tried to make a neutral observation.
— Epstein is really out there, I said.
I think it was definitely neutral as talk goes but in fact I was thinking very specific things, the main one being a feeling of absolute jealousy and aloneness that I could never tell to anyone, for what right did I have to be jealous of Romy when I myself was attached very publicly to another woman? But still, I was jealous, after all, in this melancholy way, and I was sad that it turned out that she was seeing other people, or not just seeing them but loving them in a way that perhaps she did not love me. But then of course why should I be her only love, when she was not mine? Of which jealousy there was a secret compartment, as in some portable writing desk borne with him in the night by an aristocrat fleeing the workers’ revolution, which was this vision I now possessed of Epstein’s dark penis. I don’t think I’d ever seen an aroused penis that wasn’t mine, outside various screens, and it was very strange, to be both seeing a penis and knowing it belonged to a man who was fucking a woman I loved, or was about to, and possibly in front of me. Also I must admit, it seemed large or certainly not small and as well therefore as a sadness I also was interested to feel just kind of objectively impressed, so when Romy wandered away to return to this surprising athlete I just quietly pointed the fact out to Candy.
— You think that’s cool? said Candy.
— I think it’s cool, I said.
— It’s big.
— Sure is.
— But will he ever know what it’s like, said Candy, — to have a girl take his whole cock in her mouth and then look up at him gently with her big brown eyes?
I didn’t know what to say to that. Elsewhere there were conversations –
— Are you up yet? said Romy.
— You can’t tell? replied Hiro.
– but I carried on saying nothing, and just considered the interiors.
made painful by the existence of secrets
To say you have a secret life may possibly give some basic grandeur impression – as if you enjoy meetings in private cabanas inaccessible to the average person in their parka, that you are maybe attending suppers with cardinals in their palazzos and gossiping about presidents – but really secrecy makes your ordinary life so minute and heavy, it has this difficult effect that it forces you into braveries that no one really should have to bear. It sounds contradictory or kooky but secrecy, it turns out, is a form of exposing yourself to more things in this world than you should; it is to take your privacy into places that it should not need to go – like this moment where I understood I would have to watch Romy have sex with someone else, and with my wife naked beside me, and do this with the appearance of a bland curiosity. Porn barons or fascisti might imagine such things, but I have only ever been gracious in what I imagine. I am not grand enough to end all feeling altogether and see a person as only a body or form of pleasure. But then, I was thinking, this is what happens if you possess many secrets: you will have to learn something which perhaps other people are often spared, which is that everyone is inhabiting multiple universes at the same time – it’s just that usually the various asteroids and supernovas of these universes never meet. But sometimes if you have more than one life then the present moment will unfortunately see these worlds collide, and at these moments the contemporary will therefore call for total poise and bravura, and always I have wanted to be equal to the contemporary. If I had to watch these awful things, if I had to be my era’s chubby piece of heraldry, yes if I had to be its martyr, ecstatically poaching myself in boiling oil, sunning myself on a stake, then so be it. I would take on the demented consequences myself – even if in general it was usually in fact Candy, and not me, who found the contemporary easy and possible to accept. She was always good with stressful situations, like this one of taking off your clothes in multiple company – a situation I could not help but find extremely difficult, reminding me as it did of that moment in changing rooms, when everyone is naked but pretending to ignore the situation, the imprints of sock elastic on ankles, like toothmarks. But then perhaps this is also true w
hen it’s just two of you in a room – that undressing is an unusual process, because to undress is so exhausting, it requires so many movements and processes of thinking. Yes, taking your clothes off and putting them on again in front of a stranger, it’s the most unnatural thing in the world. Perhaps that’s why desire’s necessary, otherwise no one would ever undress, not at all. Though as if in answer to my awkwardness Candy kindly gestured me underneath a duvet that someone had brought out – a child’s duvet printed with elongated footballs – and once again it struck me how tender she was, how much she loved and cared for me, while we sat there on the sofa, in observation, and in return I felt a total tenderness for her, too. But still, I do not recommend it – being present at an orgy sitting beside your wife, while watching a girl with whom you have recently woken naked in a hotel room, and bleeding – unless you’re some narco lord who is used to this condition of many wives and mistresses. Always my capacity for transgression had been very small. The usual transgressions of stealing scrips, or jumping the barriers of the metro, the manic machismo of dicking the help, I always thought these were beyond me. And so the nakedness I saw around me – because now more and more the atmosphere was happy and delighted and a large amount of people were kissing while in various states of nakedness, I say large amount which was maybe only nine or ten, but that I think is still a large amount of nakedness to observe – felt very intimidating, and in response I could feel my attention wanting to migrate, just stealing over the border into the empty wide fields. I often find it hard to concentrate on just one thing, and being here in this way I felt very much coerced or even trapped, inveigled by Fate and the very high stars – like the moment when the psychopath and his knife are claiming you, on the upstairs landing, and you know that the police goon in his squad car parked in the street below for a calm cigarro and empanada de carne is no way going to help you. And yet also I would say that, as in all things, predicting the precise degree to which you will be made uncomfortable is not an easy profession. I imagined that the problems of an orgy among close friends would be quite small, that they would be these problems of spectatorship. With spectatorship and jealousy I could make some exhausted arrangement. The bright disasters that were advancing, however, were something much more fantastical and suddenly I had this thought of my mother and my father, secluded in their bedroom, not so far away, my mother watching the late-night shows, my father snoring or in the bath, and I felt a total sadness or abandoned kind of feeling, like all I ever wanted was the miniature comedy of my parents. My father used to read the newspapers aloud to my mother, and they would comment derisively on the general scene. That kind of intimacy now seemed to me very distant and romantic, romantic perhaps precisely because it seemed so impossible and far away.
leading to difficult knowledge
As we sat there under the duvet, Romy had approached us in a kind and welcoming manner, with more drugs in her hand for us to take – and I was happy to take them because I needed to feel differently to this way I was now feeling. The problem however with narcotics is that if you take them with other people they will have effects not only on you but on others, and it’s very difficult to control how other people will react. It’s one more reason to add to these infinite files of papers why the ideal society is so far away and impossible. In a soft blurred cloud we sat there, maybe sharing jelly beans, maybe telling jokes, until I understood that what was happening beside me was that Romy and Candy were now kissing. And in my cloud and general blurred state I did understand that I was being called upon to exercise a grand restraint on my feelings – for if I had found difficult the simple sight of Romy, this interlacing with my wife was a new conundrum – and I was not sure I was equal to it. It was like watching a koan live before me. Not perhaps that this is new, not entirely. The basic effect of our many drugs is to enable things that were previously not possible, and while this is an advance I think it’s possibly also the reason why loyalty is more complicated for me and my camerados than it was for our happy parents. It’s one of the great achievements of the age in which we live, this oversharing vibe, but it also can be stressful. Already I had experienced similar dilemmas, like take something as minuscule as the general fact that if all three of us were talking and Romy needed the bathroom she could easily just naturally beckon us in with her, Candy and me, without anyone perhaps noticing that this could be novel. And once inside, it was like two time frames were overlapping. There was the old one where I pretended that nothing strange was happening, and the new more secret one where I was very softly getting excited as she did this – I don’t mean anything’s visible when a girl’s pissing, they just lean forward a little while they talk to you and presto you could be on some sleek banquette in a lovely out-of-town restaurant, but the scene still made me excited and none of this, of course, could be demonstrated to Candy. Just as now I was watching her kiss Romy and trying to succeed in finding whatever gaze might be appropriate, which was after all the gaze appropriate to Candy, since I had no wish for the veil of illusion to be torn from our eyes. But since I had no idea what the appropriate movements might be, whether Candy wanted me to join in or watch or be unimpressed, for no one wishes to be married to the man who is a maniac, and has some seedy over-obsession with girls who also like girls, I settled for the most neutral possible tone. I sat there, trying to smile. Sometimes a smile is not easy at all, like crying isn’t, but nevertheless I tried to do this for my wife, because I loved her very much. And in such a tone, it turned out, I think I could have continued for a very long while. I felt safe inside that tone. Candy and Romy were now naked together below me on the floor, with Candy’s head resting on the edge of the sofa where I sat, ensconced in a duvet. But it was after a period of some minutes that I realised Candy was now talking to me and gesturing to me to join in. And this was now a problem beyond any simple problem of tone, or expression in one’s face – and one problem I have always had has been with my face, for not only is it one of the most youthful you will ever see, but also it is always so mobile and vulnerable to giving itself away. Thoughts promenaded freely all over it, fluttered about my eyes, reposed on my lips, then vanished completely. For how are you meant to make love to your wife, when naked with a woman who is your secret inamorata and obsession, too? It’s a difficulty and one that is not without its wider meanings. Or at least I thought it was. For I could not see how else I could have acted. I had seen no way in which I needed to tell my wife about what was happening with Romy, since I did not want anyone to be hurt, and yet it was precisely this good intention that was why I was now in such a false position – and it was this moment, I now think, that marked a before and after in my life, as definite as the difference between a telephone ringing or not ringing when you’re waiting all alone in a hotel room. My definition of what was possible was being stretched just very slightly, just distended until a whole new world emerged. For everyone thinks they know how things happen, they think they have reality understood, but that’s only because the portion of reality they experience is so policed by themselves they never think how easy it might be for gore to overflow. They never think that they will have this exercise of making love as if for the first time to their paramour or mistress, while that aforesaid mistress is pleasuring their wife. It’s an incredibly stressful situation and I think that deep down I was not successful – for in the end it’s very difficult not to show some kind of knowledge or just comfort with someone’s naked body, it’s very difficult to conceal that you know how to touch them, just as it’s also obvious in the way two people might stand together, or talk to each other, with just the minutest changes in their syntax. So that whether I was licking the inside of Romy’s thighs, while sometimes pausing to kiss Candy who was there beside me, or I was putting my penis inside Romy while Candy’s hand guided it in, there was this ease or accommodation that I did feel must be obvious to Candy if she only wanted to look. But it did however seem that she wouldn’t.
a category that is complicated
>
It’s really difficult, to know what should or can be known. One thing that had always been true of Candy and which we argued over was this degree to which a person could ever confront or hold the truth entire in their head. Candy always believed in the expression of everything. She was this wild tricoteuse tough guy. Personally I found the horror movies and the Holocaust shows upsetting, I thought that never should we be shown the images of bodies being burned, or lifted lightly into wheelbarrows and other farming equipment, but Candy was sterner than I was – she thought that all the world’s pain was like the old Electronium, with all the massacres pre-recorded, and perhaps she’s right, perhaps it’s just laziness to think the way I used to think.
CANDY
So for example you have some Nazi planning how to kill people. Like how do you burn a hundred bodies if you only have the coal for ten?
ME
You cannot do it –
CANDY
You are just not thinking right. Like why not film a gas chamber?
ME
Lurid & Cute Page 9