by Angela Kelly
When we became student and teacher must have happened while I was daydreaming because I failed to notice the transition.
“Let’s walk down on the beach first.” Following behind her in a daze, I knew that, even if I had no desire for her at all, I was going to make love to her under the boardwalk because she wanted me to. Maybe she was a witch. I’d been under the sexual control of a woman before, but this was somehow more ethereal, more Zen-like. She wanted to teach me something and I was willing to be taught, whether she was an angel of heaven or hell made no difference.
We stopped at a Tiki bar on the pier and got two Budweisers in plastic cups; the staple cocktail of the Jersey shoreline. Walking down the wooden ramp to the sand, I noticed from the moment we emerged from the parking lot, she hadn’t touched me at all, not even so much as a brush of her hand against mine when she went to grab her cup from the counter.
My blood still boiled in my loins from the sheer sensation of denim against my bare clit. (I wasn’t one for undergarments.) Without any effort at all, she forced me to want her more with each second that passed, it was unnerving but riveting.
“What did you learn from Blake?” she asked, patting a patch of beach beside her under the pylons of the pier. I took an enormous swallow of beer and tried to separate my intellectualism from my sexuality. Then, like an epiphany, the realization hit me that I should not be separating the two at all.
“I learned the absurdity of socialization. As humans, we are living proof of all of life’s contradictions and, also as humans, it is our job to resolve them.”
“Correct,” she announced as she changed her position so we were facing each other, her legs bent over my own. The rush 36
came back again at the feel of her skin against mine, even clothed as we were.
“So, if you realize the absurdity of socialization, why, then, would you think it was wrong to make love in a car in a parking lot?”
She dipped a finger into my beer and then ran it over my lips.
“I didn’t say I thought it was wrong. I guess I don’t really know what I was thinking. I want to make the next couple of days last as long as possible.”
“Yes,” she said as she pulled off her shirt. “But in the greater realm of things, what if the next few days were all we had, all any of us have? Then you would wish you had done more.”
I reached out to touch her breasts but kept speaking. “It is the desire to have more time that makes us have so little.” I gently brushed the hair back from her face and exposed a singular tear running down the side of her cheek.
She kissed my open palm and continued, “Do you believe as Blake did that we are all fundamentally evil?”
I unbuttoned my shirt down to my navel. “Yes,” I said,
“because according to Blake evil and desire are one and the same, which also means evil is inherently a myth.”
I felt as if I were in a dreamlike state, never before had I experienced the culmination of philosophy and sexual anticipation, it was exhilarating but somehow deeply tragic, and I felt my own tears well up in spite of my breathless heat. When I went to wipe them away, Janine held my hands to her chest and kissed me with desperation.
She whispered in my ear, “There should be no shame in the face of desire. Do you remember why religion and life are in such contradiction to each other?”
“Yes,” I breathed softly. She pushed me back onto the sand, straddled me, and unzipped my jeans.
“Tell me.”
This was the most mind-blowing foreplay I had ever experienced, I lack the words to express it. Suddenly, though, clear thinking arose to my lips without effort and I paraphrased Blake to the best of my ability as she lightly stroked me, still constricted by denim.
37
“All religious codes are based on the idea that the mind and body are separate.”
And, I know now that they most certainly are not, I thought to myself.
“That energy, also known as desire, and still further known as evil, comes from the body. Logic and reason, otherwise known as good, come from the soul.”
Relentlessly I unbuttoned her jeans and rolled on top of her. She tugged at my belt loops and begged me to go on.
“But, Blake set out to prove that ‘man has no body distinct from his soul.’”
I couldn’t talk anymore. We became involved in a struggle that rivaled that of good and evil. Somehow, we managed to completely unclothe each other over the next few seconds that seemed an eternity. I swear I heard a distant rumbling of thunder, and the sounds of the tide reached my ears in an onslaught of my senses. Over and over we rolled, never breaking away from each other’s lips, alternating between rubbing and sliding fingers in and out of each other’s bodies. She bit my lower lip so hard our kisses erotically mingled with blood.
Anticipating release mounted like terror and I dug my nails into her spine like an animal that was unrecognizable but nevertheless an integral part of me. Sex had become a war in which it ceased to matter who won; the victor and victim would be equally triumphant.
Laying side by side, a virtual kamikaze of flailing arms and legs, she put her lips to my ear one last time and breathed a final extract from a “Song of Experience,” “‘ Those who restrain desire do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained. ’”
I met the challenge by coming so hard I swear I ejaculated like a man. Only a fraction of a second later, Janine followed with a small yelp and collapsed into my arms, battle won, Janine: 1, Maggie: 0. For a moment I thought the earth would open up and swallow us both and I didn’t care.
Teach me a lesson she did: all we are comprised of as a human race are blood, cum, sweat, and tears, everything we do and everything we are can be reduced to four everyday 38
elements. Or perhaps this wasn’t a creed for the whole world and everyone in it, but it was, if nothing else, what this complicated relationship would come to be based upon. My desire for her would never be restrained because it was too great.
I cradled her in my arms and wept silently. No ideas arose of how I would cope once these days were over and my life returned to normal. But, angel of mercy as she was, Janine transformed herself into her carefree spirit mode and said,
“Tomorrow we can cover the Marquis de Sade.”
Laughing in spite of myself, I arose and pulled her to her feet. Nightfall had overtaken us during our lust-frenzied war, and we gently wiped dried sand from each other’s bodies slowly and languorously in the moonlight glimmering off the waves.
Dressed and parched, we discarded our long ago knocked over cups of beer and headed to the Aztec, another long-standing monument on the boardwalk. She rarely let go of my hand as we made our way through the crowds, which was a tremendous delight to someone like me who cherishes feeling needed. I wanted desperately to tell her I’d never in my life had sex like that before, but was afraid she would not repeat my words. She probably knew anyway. Upon entering the Aztec, there was Janine’s song again blaring out from the jukebox.
“Two drafts please,” I said to the bartender. “Does it bother you?” I asked.
“Sometimes. I mean, it’s just one song, but a hit song epitomizes the whole rock star dilemma. Sure, you want to be successful, but then there’s that nagging commercialism versus artistic integrity.”
“Well, we all need to make a living. At least you’re making one doing something you love.” I had always been too lazy to dedicate my life to writing. It was much easier to publish once in a while and still know I had a weekly salary to depend on.
“I worry about success. I don’t want to become one of those artists on TV claiming that the pressure became too overwhelming so I turned to sex and drugs and threw it all away.
Although, I think I did that long before a hit song. Long before I was even a singer.”
39
“Long live sex, drugs, and rock and roll. It’s an American past time, you should just enjoy it.”
“I do.” She looked thoughtfully into he
r beer mug. “You know, you’re the first person I’ve met since this newfound success who allows me to forget who I am. This is the first time you’ve even mentioned my career. It’s nice to have someone see me as a real, everyday person.”
“Janine, I will never see you as an everyday person. I’ve never met anyone like you, or that knows the things you do in the way you do.” I paused for a moment and decided to get it over with.
“I don’t like to think about who you really are because then I have to think about what that means for me.”
“I can’t make promises. But I will say this; it pisses me off a little that you assume that what happened on the beach not more than an hour ago is some sort of standard practice for me.
Is it so difficult to imagine I have feelings too? Maybe even feelings for you? Do you have any idea how hard it is to be who I am and find people who can recite Blake’s theories on religion from memory?”
Yes, I did. I had a hard time finding people like that myself.
“I guess we’ve been looking too hard or just in the wrong places. I’m sorry.” Sorry as I was, I couldn’t help but smile. It was possible after all, that whatever this was could somehow, some way, continue beyond the looming LA trip.
“Okay then. As long as we understand each other.” She laughed. “As if that were humanly possible.”
40
Chapter 3
When Janine left for LA two days later, I became solid steel. We said goodbye at my apartment like old friends, and I assumed the several times she made mention of when we would see each other again was just her way of being polite.
“Too Much Trouble” had been steadily climbing its way up the Billboard charts, she would be in greater and greater demand with each passing day. I was grateful I’d had my three days, it was a nice story I’d get to tell my friends. Beyond that, I convinced myself I expected nothing, regardless of how I felt, or imagined she might feel. Those few days and nights had been magical, but the real world was waiting just outside the door.
Who was I kidding, that day at beach, imagining the relationship would continue beyond our 3-day weekend? It was easier, simpler, and much less painful to pretend it never happened. I set about a rigorous course of action to forget her that included overtime at work and more alcohol consumption and one night stands than usual. Trying to forget someone I had feelings for wasn’t new territory for me, I had a lot of practice over the years. But Janine was very hard to shake. I stopped listening to the radio, her song was everywhere. I was in Pandora’s Box in the village and it was on the damn jukebox.
One day at work Jan strolled in wearing a Joan Orlean shirt she’d purchased the night of the party. I felt the universe was fucking with me, and I didn’t like it one bit.
About ten days after we’d said goodbye, I came home from work and a stuffed manila envelope fell to the floor as I was sifting through my mail. The return address was somewhere in LA. I sunk to the floor and started to cry, Janine had not forgotten me after all. Smiling through my tears, laughing at my silly attempts to deny what I felt, I tore open the package. The first thing to fall out was a CD single of “Too Much Trouble” with Janine’s script in black magic marker sprawling across the cover that read, “To my Jersey girl.” If that had been all the package contained, I would have been overjoyed, but there was more. A photograph from a shoot for the next album cover showed 41
Janine half smiling at the camera with the boys in the band surrounding her on all sides. A sheaf of cocktail napkins with random lines and paragraphs of poetry, and a note on the last napkin that said, “You’re helping me finish this when I get home.”
And, finally, a brief letter:
Darling Maggie,
I am sure the moment I walked out the door you thought you would never hear from me. My dear girl, so scarred from past betrayals, I understand your fears. It seems so unfair that the moment I found you, this corporate world of music wants to swallow me whole. I never really wanted to be a rock star.
I think about you every moment alone I can steal. There is something deep within me that wants to tell you all my secrets.
I’m sorry I haven’t called, it is hard for me to get away on my own for any length of time. I just keep thinking of how much sweeter it will be the next time I get to see you. I wish I could see your face when you opened the package. You probably had that little grin that starts at one corner of your mouth and spreads across your face like an artist’s hand.
Soon, Janine
I wished desperately I could pick up the phone and call her, but outside of the city I had no idea where she was or how to reach her. I knew inside I would see her again, I just didn’t know when. But the mere fact she was going to come back amazed me, so much that I had what I believed was a small panic attack. Not knowing how else to medicate anything from the flu to rabies, I poured myself a tall glass of single malt scotch with shaky hands.
Now what? I sat down at my kitchen counter, grabbed the phone, and called my best friend in the whole world, Cindy.
An hour later we were at Sea Salt in the village sharing a pitcher of Long Island iced tea and an enormous cob salad. “I can’t believe you didn’t call me sooner,” she complained.
“Cin, this whole thing only happened less than a couple of weeks ago. Sometimes we go for months without talking to each other.”
42
“I know, I know. Listen, I’ve known you since we were little kids in Milltown. And I’ll tell you something. That look that’s on your face right now? I haven’t seen that since Ellen Trainer when we were in the fifth grade.”
“And what look is that?” I asked. “Terrified? Tortured?
Obsessed?”
“Smitten,” she grinned. “It’s cute.”
Cindy and I had known each other practically since birth.
It was fair to say she knew me better than anyone did, and I trusted her opinion. When I had moved away to the cornfields of Illinois, she was one of less than a half dozen people I maintained contact with besides relatives on the coast. She had done everything I had ever been afraid to do: she was in a rock band when she was 20 and they actually were achieving some local success, but she walked away from that to travel with the Peace Corps for a few years, then she met some sort of guru on a retreat weekend and followed him to live with Buddhist monks in Tibet for a year. She came back to the States and, of all things, went to law school, and now she worked for an elite firm in upper Manhattan.
She was one of the most interesting people I’d ever had the pleasure of knowing, and one of a very limited number of women in my life I had not slept with, thereby maintaining the sanctity of our relationship. I trusted her above anyone else, and I had to tell someone about Janine.
“You know how I feel about bisexual women,” I said.
“Nothing but trouble.” I looked down into my glass.
“Well, it’s not like you just found that out. You knew going in. You always do that, and then want to use it as an excuse later on to bail. I also know you’re enlightened enough to understand it doesn’t really matter. People fall in love with people, all that gender driven sexuality crap is a bunch of bullshit.”
Of course she was right. I was often drawn to women who were unavailable to me for one reason or another, and being bisexual was my favorite choice. It gave me a way to not commit and an easy out when intimacy became too intense or complicated for my liking. I liked to find women who were 43
emotionally unavailable because, really, it was me who was afraid, me who was unavailable. Cindy knew me too well.
“Yeah, but Cin, I mean, come on. She’s a fucking rock star, for Christ’s sake. That’s a whole new level of unattainable for me. What will I do, sit home and watch porn and hang out with the cat while she’s on tour in Japan, or Australia, or God knows where?”
She gave me the look all best friends have. The one that says, “I know the truth about you.” She lit a cigarette with a match. I found this endearing about her. Cindy was a
woman who could afford Zippo lighters made out of gold if she wanted one, yet she was always rummaging through her purse to find a match. She was also constantly quitting smoking, but never quite managed to do it, like it was a project she kept putting off.
“The truth, kiddo, is you have strayed farther and farther from your true self ever since you ended things with Liz. That was nearly ten years ago, for God’s sake. I won’t say just get over it already because I know, I know it was the most painful thing you have ever been through. I know she was the only woman you ever really loved. But just because that didn’t work out doesn’t give you license to abandon the hope of ever being happy.”
I flinched when she mentioned Liz, still, after all those years. But it was true, that relationship ending changed me profoundly, and I still wasn’t over it. Or maybe I was, but it was easier to lament the past then face an uncertain future. The end of my one and only failed marriage proposal had come to be something that defined me, built in to my personality and carried into my other romantic relationships.
As if on cue, she said, “You have a chance here to not bring that memory with you. It’s a new day, my friend. And you’ve got to admit, no matter what happens, its damn exciting stuff. This is what we live for! I remember when you were someone who believed in that, fate and chance and the value of experience…what happened to you, Maggie?”
I’ve just become a cynical, emotionally shut down alcoholic, I thought to myself. “I don’t know Cin, I just don’t know.” I started to cry a little without any kind of internal warning.
44
Embarrassed, I excused myself and went to the restroom. I splashed some cold water on my face and took a long hard look in the mirror and thought, Jesus, what is happening to me? I knew the answer. Janine had really gotten to me, deep down under my skin. I didn’t know how, but I knew it had happened.
Yes, it could absolutely be fate, or a past life connection, or something equally esoteric. Whatever it was, I knew Cindy was right, and whatever was going to happen with Janine was like a runaway train, and there was no stopping it.