The Pleasure of M

by Michel Farnac

  But now our time has come and as we step onto the dais to enact this passion, this mystery, the walls dissolve… and are replaced with the golden sunlight streaming through the windows of the porch. The afternoon light is so intense that the trees can only see their own reflections in the glass. You stand before me, looking out, naked. I unclasp the necklace that you are still wearing. I let it descend on your torso until the jewel brushes against your nipples, oh so gently. You seek the touch of my fingers on your skin but can sense only the gold playing on your skin. I put the necklace aside, unfasten your earrings, carefully, and I slide the bracelet off your wrist and take a step back to look at your back, your buttocks, the back of your knees. It is the last time I look at you without knowing what if feels like to touch you. Each step we take together will be for me a new deflowering. I will take you to an Eden I have been told of and you will be my guide. I break the silence to ask: “Are you ready?” and I patiently wait for the signal. I am in no hurry. I have long known where I would first touch you when the moment would come. You must be wondering where as you say “I’m ready”…

  The right index and middle finger pressed together in a horizontal sign of benediction, I slowly press the back of my hand to the curve at the base of your spine where back becomes buttocks. Slowly stroking up and down the back of my fingers espouses the contour of the gentle slopes. I let my warm breath cover the back of your neck and drift on your shoulders. My other hand rises, the tip of my fingers gently alight between your shoulders, slowly moving up to the base of your scalp. I caress your neck while I let my other hand lower, turn and mold one cheek, then the other and I trace the separation upward, then your spine, bringing my hands together. Shoulders under my hands, I let my thumbs find the contour of your shoulder blades before gently caressing your back with full hands in downward circular motion. My hands pass over your hips and clasp for a moment over your navel as I rest my chin on your shoulder. My left hand slowly moves to your right breast, and my right hand moves down. My mouth has found its way to your earlobe, which my tongue now explores. I bring your body to mine and let my phallus press against your back like an obelisk in a bas-‐relief. My fingers have been navigating the folds of flesh between your legs with abandon, befriending your clitoris, at times pressing against the orifice with their tips, but only to gage the caper, to determine how easily the gates would open under pressure…

  Time is suspended as I wait for the tension to build in you, our bodies becoming fused in an ancient dance. Soon you rhythmic motion is disrupted by the first spasm and I gently tighten my embrace, enveloping your body in mine as you let the orgasm reach and fire every synapse in your brain. When you can no longer stand, I gather you up into my arms and take you to the couch and lay there with you in silence for a moment.

  Yours always,

  Michel”

  “Dearest Michel,

  I was touched to see your message this morning and to be reassured that I remain on and in your mind. I find myself spending much of my day fixating on prior phone conversations and email messages. I love to go back into my secret folder and re-‐read some of our missives. Very potent material, indeed -‐ mine as well as yours. Here is a short excerpt from my day.

  I see a therapeutic massage therapist about every 3 weeks and today was the appointed day. I am very appreciative of his very strong hands -‐ strength that females just do not possess. Today I am wearing a calf-‐length skirt with high slit in the back. If you were following along behind me, you would be able to catch a glimpse of that area behind my knees that you seem so fond of. I am also wearing a blouse with hidden snaps down the front. Once I am in the treatment room, you would hear a series of clicks as my blouse opens with one swift tug. I proceed to remove my skirt and then my panties. I leave the bra for last, remembering how you spoke of that image once. I think about standing before you in that guise. I don't believe I have ever left my bra for the end before. There is a full-‐length mirror on the back of the door and I see myself as you would see me. And so, totally naked, I slip between the sheets for this little bit of relaxation.

  My silky skin beckons to you...........

  Yours, Catherine”

  Catherine often introduced into their exchanges allusions to their previous conversations which Michel perceived as a touching form of attentiveness, a tender and careful yet not self-‐conscious weaving of a sense of continuity in their relationship, a subtle counterbalance to the ever changing nature of his discourse, the ever morphing backdrop of his dreamscapes. It was in a way akin to the gentle ministering of a female touch to the sheath as the sword within grows erect, a gentle waxing and waning to encourage and grow the inexorable advance of their affair. Theirs was a dance of the seven veils in many ways, bound from beginning to end in an ancient choreography, an event out of the normal flow of time and space where the object of desire surges and recedes in co-‐centric circles, never letting its presence be ignored. Catherine had developed a certain fondness for the subtle sound of his arrhythmic breathing on the phone whenever he was aroused, and she would often turn their conversations to descriptions of torrid foreplay, describing how she would touch him, please him, make him squirm with pleasure. This had on him the desired effect and their conversations would echo in his mind and in his loins for hours after they ended.

  “Dear Catherine, What happened after we hang up is worthy of the most wicked script by Charlie Kaufman (Being John Malkovich, Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind...). You have left us floating in a very vivid scene of fellatio. You sit back in a comfortable chair, cradling your glass of wine with its few remaining sips, and begin picturing the scene. Now if the phallus is a sword, it can be pointed inward as well as outward, depending on circumstance, and my erection at that point is piercing my gut. At first, as I feverishly begin to masturbate, I am watching us: watching myself receive your selfless gift of pleasure, watching and becoming the me whose cock is engulfed in your mouth. But then I notice you afar, watching us just as I am, holding the glass in one hand, gently caressing yourself with the other, a Mona Lisa-‐like smile on your dimly lit face. And I am transfixed; and suddenly I am standing behind you, stroking myself feverishly. So now I am watching you watching yourself giving me head.

  That vision was short-‐lived, cut short by the ejaculation that thrust me back into your mouth for an instant before finding myself back in my apartment, quite alone and yet somehow deliriously happy.

  Yours,

  Michel”

  This kind of prose had on her the desired effect and his messages would echo in her mind and in her loins for hours after she had read them.

  “Dearest Michel, Just when I think your words can take me no further.........it happens again. Your words elicits vivid images in my mind and powerful reactions in my body. I was not expecti
ng a message this morning, but of course was secretly hoping for one, and you did not disappoint me. No one has ever written such things to me before

  I awoke at 4 am this morning and my first waking thought was of our last conversation. It took some time before I could put myself back to sleep. Yours devotedly,

  Catherine”

  Such messages often left Michel in a mixed state, joyous and perplexed. That he could so freely evoke his innermost sentiments with her and have her react in such a strong way was at once liberating and stunning. It reminded him of the moment when the slaves are freed in Verdi’s Nabucco, blinded by the light, freed but stunned. He and Catherine could speak of anything unencumbered. They were curious about each other and enjoyed the satisfying of the other’s curiosity, a form of exhibitionism exacerbated by the physical separation and encouraged by their reciprocal tendency toward voyeurism, sexual surely but also emotional. They shared stories of their present and their past, as teenagers would with this notable difference that they had many more stories to tell and a far larger vocabulary to recount them with, but with the same shedding of self-‐consciousness that only bonded trust can provide, the confidence born of powerful shared secrets. In response to Catherine‘s questions and his own growing interesting in remembering these events, Michel tried to track the moments in his memory that added up to his sexual awakening. What stunned him at first is how vivid these moments were, years after they occurred. Of course, considering that the absence of a context in which to evaluate them defined them to a large extent, they were seared into memory quite naturally by their novelty and power, so that their clarity was not so much a surprise, but rather the clarity of the feelings that he had experienced stunned him in that their evocation in a semi-‐meditative trance could allow him to remember them viscerally: for a moment he was there again. The first event occurred when he was eight. He debated for awhile whether or not to include it in his account of first sexual pleasures, since that was the self imposed theme here. But in thinking about it, he felt that there was truly a great importance in recounting that narrative in its entirety because of the importance that he was suddenly realizing that it must have. Indeed if the first sexual experiences of a person are without context, they become the context for much of the experiences that follow, since their apprehension defines the tone for those to follow. But while one’s first driving experience, for instance, might have a bearing on how one will drive for many years, the sexual gestalt necessarily has an influence over a much wider palette of traits and behaviors. And if the apprenticeship of sexual pleasure defines a person’s ability to give, receive and seek pleasure, then to understand a person fully in sexual terms one would have to know how they first encountered sexual pleasure, something of an unfolding that would naturally occur over a span of several years and could only be fully appreciated and understood within the emotional framework within which it had been received. As such, the first moment of awareness that there is such a thing as sexual pleasure sets the path upon which the sexual adventure will unfold: good or evil, natural or unnatural, casual or sacred, mysterious or anatomical, guilty or open. And this first event at eight, innocent as it was, contained so many elements that would have their significance that in the end he felt compelled to include it.

  “Dear Catherine, I will now begin a journey that will take us through the sequence of events that lead to my first orgasm. As I have told you before, I think that if you know what an orgasm feels like for a man (and I have tried to give you some insight into that) and also know what the first orgasm of a man can be like, you can use your knowledge of the human experience and human condition to extrapolate pretty much into any man’s inner workings when it comes to sex. I realize that this is a lofty claim and one that needs some defense before it can be undertaken (by the way, I realize also that I am writing like some pedantic 18th century twerp, but I can’t help it). My claim can only hold I f the experience described is typical, and there is a bit of a rub there: how could I possibly claim that my experience was typical?

  Well, to start with, I think that you know me well enough to know that I would be happy to claim otherwise and to assert that my experiences were quite unique and very much out of the ordinary. But in all honesty, a review of the events I will describe revealed to me that there was not much that could be thought of as atypical (with one notable exception that I will make clear as needed). I’ll also point out that part of my experiences were shared, meaning that at least some others had the same start as me. Finally, my experiences were unencumbered, and while that might be atypical, I believe that most men have relatively unencumbered awakenings, at least in our cultures…

  With this abomination of a preamble made (“Michel you think too much” I hear you say, yes, I know dearest…) let me take you to a long ago Normandy… I was nine years old when this happened. It was in the summer, and I was out camping for a week with my cub scout den (this is the French scouts, mind you, a catholic outfit I’ll have you note in passing, where I got most of my education on Catholicism). This is the only event in the year that has us out camping for more than one night, and so the tent sleeping arrangements as you can imagine were of paramount importance. I was sharing the tent with three very good pals. Every day, we had an hour of quiet time after the meal, in the tent. Many napped but most talked, as did my cohorts and I. One afternoon, the topic of girls was turned to by my friend Pascal. He was very mature, perhaps in part because his parents were divorced and he lived with his single mother, still a bit of a novelty back then. He spoke of naked women, as I recall, and exotic dances and veils. We were squirming in our sleeping bags, and Laurent, another friend, asked us all if we had a hard-‐on. I did, without being aware of it. He was asked to explain himself and did so rather eloquently, telling us what it was, how it came about and that it was a reflex reaction and quite natural. We were edified. A bond of fraternity was created in that moment that would soon vanish in the long summer to come, but that strengthened our maleness into consciousness, honing it to a new level of perception. For the first time in our lives, we were presented with a firm physical understanding of what girls were about and what their true meaning to us would eventually be…

  Yours,

  Michel”

  Catherine found the account both charming and fascinating, though it raised many questions in her mind, a thirst for details never easily quenched in her. When they next spoke, she jumped on the topic.

  “You were right about your introduction, it was quite boring” she chided “but when I was done, I had to reread it and I think I got what you were trying to say, but you do think too much.”

  “I know, but somehow some of this seems like such a tall order. I am trying to describe what a man feels or can feel, so I’m trying to not be in the way of the description too m
uch.”

  “But that is a bit ridiculous in that you are just describing yourself.”

  “Well, yes, but that’s why I try to focus on the experience rather than just me. In this case it’s easier because I was not alone.” “So did you play with each other?”

  “Ah, good question, but no.”

  “With yourselves?”

  “Nope, not that either, at least not me. It was the mid-‐day rest time, and we were in our tent but we were quite fully clothed and there was no thought of anything other than the immediate moment of discovery for me. I think that part of the fascination was this new phenomenon of something happening to me that I did not control and yet was incontrovertibly caused by me. I knew that the arousal was mine and suddenly I discovered that the erection was mine as well when I had not felt it.”

  “You hadn’t felt it?” “You know, even as an adult it is not uncommon for a man to suddenly realize that he is erect. You can get there without realizing it, or at least a chunk of the way there.“

  “Ah, yes, your famous duality of the penis.”

  “Well, yes.”

  “There is something very cute, very innocent about this story.”

  “Because we were, both cute and innocent. And because in a way, I was very lucky. That was a very sweet introduction to the topic of sex. Laurent had received a thorough education by that time from his hippie parents who believed in full disclosure and sex-‐ed. Pascal had seen a bunch of boyfriends come and go in his mother’s life and could hear way too much through the paper-‐thin walls of the subsidized housing they lived in. Fabrice, well, Fabrice had a different revelation that day, I guess. It turns out that he way gay. What really turned him on was the fact that we were turned on.”