“But the wind blows all the ashes into scattered dust throughout the universe never to return again, never to re-kindle the ashes. It’s the absurdity of life that the one second sparkle is followed by one second eternal dark nothingness,” said Robin.
“Well, then, my Big Claudio is not impotent either,” said Kitty. “And I’m still a virgin at heart and soul no matter how many lovers I take.”
“Robin, you break my heart,” said Sharon.
“The world is too much with us,” said Robin, quoting the famous poet. She coughed out a huge glob of phlegm and neatly spat it out into the fine linen napkin of the Seven Seas Restaurant. “My head is killing me.”
“Gianni, the check, please,” said Sharon. “And please call us three separate cabs. I’ve had enough of these two for the week.”
She reached in her purse and took out her Dior sunglasses to duck the vicious afternoon sun which is especially harsh on smashed brains.
“It sure is damn hard to take the Lord’s word seriously now days,” Kitty smiled. “What with Christmas sales so early …what was all that mumbo-jumbo about, Sharon?”
“I was trying to put a little character into our neat striped suits …” Sharon betrayed Jesus and lied.
Robin felt her throat clogging up again. She coughed to clear her throat but this time swallowed her spittle. Deep in her soul she had the depressing thought that indeed in wine there is truth. She wanted to get home and have some more wine.
Lovely, lovely wine, she thought; our Lord’s blood, to make you think clearly.
“As usual, it was fun,” said Kitty. “See you guys next Wednesday. Give me a call Sharon; you too, Robin.”
They all laughed and emptied that last swig of the fine Bordeaux.
They parted company as quietly and as lonely as they had arrived; but for their friendship, their treasured memories would blunt the dullness of their everyday existence into a cutting edge of bouncy insouciance ‘till next time. There had been a little bit of gossip, a little bit of posturing, a little bit of acrimony; it was all to be expected from a normal rich girls’ exaggerated vanity.
They parted full of irony, detached from any dishonest friendship. The honest thing about drinking is that it removes from debts. You owe nothing to the world, nothing to anyone, friend or otherwise. You’re sailing clean and light. It’s when you’re sober that doubts begin.
There is no better friendship than booze.
They went their own ways feeling good which was always the reason for their get-togethers. Only best friends get together to feel good.
Chapter Fifteen
My Dearest Myrna,
Before I met you I thought I was in love with another woman. She was the daughter of a visiting German physics professor at UCLA. She was a true Teutonic unassuming beauty and definitely an insatiable nympho which was ok with me because I too was a young man at my peak and I couldn’t get enough either. We were both graduate students and had all the time in the world to make love every day. Other students ran around the UCLA campus trying to cool their sexual needs but we just met and “focked” as she always said. The more we made love the more we wanted. Every afternoon we met she would say things like “you’ve been gone so long” and “I’ve missed you so much”. And then with her Germanic full lips she would say, “You want to fock me now, it’s ok with me,” and gladly I would.
After several months of this fucking around I began to have guilt feelings thinking that I was taking advantage of a naïve, beautiful young woman alone in a foreign country. I became convinced that what we were doing was nice but probably immoral and sought to dampen our humping afternoons with a talk to her father hoping to get some sort of approval, or his wrath and thus to discontinue what I was doing to his daughter and erase my guilt feelings.
He was a serious man, in his early fifties with a big bald spot on the crown of his head.
“Vell,” he said with a Germanic chiselled thick accent, “I understand what you are saying. But you must also understand that Ursula is my dear daughter and if that’s what’s making her happy that’s what I want for her too.”
I then suggested to Ursula that before we could carry on with our dirty little affair we should at least get another opinion. She being a Catholic from Bavaria proposed that we should go for counselling, or perhaps to confession, at a local Catholic priest.
The priest, a kindly old celibate, agreed to listen to our common sin.
“Do you love this woman,” he asked me?
It was the first time that I was confronted with that question. To me it was an obsolete inquiry right out of the Middle Ages. The question of love is relevant only in instances of intended marriage.
“Well, to tell you the truth, Father, I’ve never … well … I’m not sure,” I answered humbly but truthfully.
“Do you love this man,” he asked Ursula.
“What the fock does that have to do with this, our confession?” she asked in true Teutonic fury.
“You are standing in the Holy Garden of the Blessed Virgin,” said the priest. “Get the fuck out of here the both of you. You are the worst of sinners, damned for Hell.”
Ursula never wanted to see me after that. More importantly, the old priest made me realize the enormity of my sins and I was so very glad when I met you who were so very different from nympho Ursula. If you recall, we went days without even kissing which made me love you even more.
‘How shall I tell thee how much I love you’ when I behold your beautiful face come alive before the wide screen memory of my mind? Your hair, your eyes, your smile, they’re all forever captured inside my brain. Most of all I miss your intestinal fortitude. I confess, I love and miss you very, very much and even though I’m not with you, don’t think of my absence as an abandonment of you or my daughters. My leaving you is my way of telling you that, like nature’s way of signalling that life’s seasons and their blossoms must come to an end, so, it’s all over for us too in spite of our past perfect romance.
You and I are sinners, my wife. I look up to Heaven and I ask myself, do I love her? Really love her? And the answer is ‘I’m not sure.’
Which I suppose makes us sinners. There’s no going back; I believe in the future.
You might think my departure as sudden, that I lack proper judgement, but if you search your heart you’ll find relief that I’m gone from our once exaggerated muddled life; you’ll wonder why it hadn’t happened earlier. Like the trees that consume their discarded leaves beneath them, so we too had begun to consume each other, and worse, our little girls. I left you because I didn’t want to be a cannibal. As I grew older I began to sense a downhill slide; that my being was drowning in pathetic despair. I began to forget what loving you was like, and though we dutifully made love every so often, I could no longer smell you beneath me, didn’t care to touch your body as I used to; and you too had lost your appetite and impatiently huffed and puffed beneath me desperately trying to arouse the passions. It was no use; we had crossed into old age. The habit was all in the mind and the yawn was irreversible. There was no chance for replay.
I saw Justine and Meredith growing up and I realized that I didn’t want to stand in their way. If I had stayed with you I would not have been able to bear watching our daughters go their natural way, growing up, no longer my little girls but someone else’s brash and wanton young women. Jealously, I would have stymied them, curiously wanting to spy on them and relive my pointless life through their most natural, lively, self-indulgent enthusiasm. It would have been dishonest for us to interfere in the pleasures of their youth; and surely, I’m ashamed to admit, I would have, if I had stayed around.
In some aimless way, I felt that I was standing in your way as well. I realized that we had completed what nature had intended for us and that the angst we were beginning to sense in each other was nature’s way of telling us that we had come full circle,
that it was all over for us. Unlike our daughters, our leaves and colors have turned yellow, and though yellow is beautiful to behold, few want to bend over us, to touch and smell us. We are in the late July of our years with our petals drooping, thirsty, and no sweet flowing nectar to offer. Like the myth of Persephone, we too must now find our way through the darkness of our winter lives sans love, sans friends, alone until our daughters give birth to new seasons, and I don’t want to be there.
I turned away from the life we knew, like nature has intended me to do. I didn’t want to encourage you to do the same. I’m only sorry I couldn’t help you. So slide to your death without me with all the pleasing ways you know and never think of sin, a most unnatural punishment. Enjoy what life still has to offer you and never look back for I might surprise you and be there, and I don’t want to. Think of the magnificent afterlife that awaits us all.
You are no longer my destiny. My destiny has always been to try and save my soul.
Did you know that the word ‘monk’ comes from the Greek and means alone, a recluse? And thus we are alone; even in the arms of another we are alone. Imagine, I prefer being alone to being with you. In all honesty, I don’t know how long this will last. Other monks here have similar doubts. The head monk says it’s only natural and that God understands. You might say that a lot of guys have said what I’m now saying to their wives but few have become hermits. Anyway, sometimes I think I should come back to you but then there’s all the other baggage that you carry; like your beautiful daughters who, together with you, were driving me crazy.
I could say I forgive you for slighting me, but in an irony strangely understood in, of all places, a holy monastery where I had hoped to find humility and forgiveness, I realized after much prayer and contemplation, that forgiveness is God’s cruellest joke. I can imagine the Lord and his saints in continuous hilarity every time someone prays for forgiveness. For what is there for me to forgive in you, or you in me? Forgive that we were born? That we grew up driven by nature’s relentless instinct to find happiness and to reproduce like all other life forms on earth? That we loved the sweet taste of life and found wonderful feelings of pleasure at the sight of beauty? There is no sin in me nor any sin in you that we need to ask each other for forgiveness. No, there’s nothing to forgive. Remember, pleasure and death are the only true passions in life; that pleasure, happiness, love, and so much more are synonyms for life, while death has no meaning, no synonyms; it is alone and unforgiving, a final act of nothingness. So, have no guilt in what you do and ask not for forgiveness for there’s nothing to forgive.
And so also with Justine and Meredith: leave them alone; let them preen to their fullest colors. Give them room to find their own way and never admonish them. They need to have their own space, unbridled by the unnatural morality of aging parents who’ve conveniently forgotten their own natural desires. Let them have their way, Myrna; let them taste of all that comes their way, for all is life. Don’t stand in their way. They can do no wrong in your life. Do not love them too much.
And what of your friends?
Fuck them. They’re just trying to save their own ass from assured defoliation. They will invariably betray you because betrayal is in the nature of friendship.
You are a beautiful woman, very clever, but obviously trapped in a marriage you regret.
I free you, I love you, fare thee well.
*
What a fucking dolt, thought Myrna as she continued to read the constipated letter. For years you live with the son-of-a-bitch and you think you know him and then he sends you a schizoid letter like this. She was glad he was out of her life.
Chapter Sixteen
It was a most beautiful moment. Hundreds of young stunning naked vestals danced among the wild flowers swaying to the breezes within the printed wallpaper all around her bedroom. Such alluring alabaster young girls’ bodies with full firm hips on long slender legs, and voluptuous pink breasts with ripening red nipples dancing in tandem with long arms freely whirling through the sensuous fields of paintings and pleasure. Unkindly the adolescent girls of the wall reminded her of her aging, and of her softening breasts now fully matured with no bounce in them and no longer adolescent, and the unstoppable swiftness of time and the inevitability of death. The dancing was too furious all around, the room too hot, and the damn light as always too bright. Her nude body was sweltering hot and she turned on the house sprinkler system and instantaneously the bedroom became the great outdoors of spring. Sharon too now danced amidst the vestals, the fine mist of the spring afternoon denuding her of all sin on top of her immense garden bed.
She popped another treasured pill to feel a more poignant high, and another swig of lovely vodka, and the lysergic acid unfolded even more powerfully in her mind as did the multi-hued petals of the wall-paper luscious roses whose every unfolding of one virgin petal after another let surface in her mind unending rows of more impetuous petals of her own, each row more pink, more vibrant, and more blushing than the one before. She was in a dancing universe, in a starry sky of infinite sparkling lights, in a presence beyond death. She touched herself and felt as if she were a red, red rose in the sparkling dew-filled early morning of Eden. With soft gentle fingers she opened herself with touches from the running rivers of the seas within and without her. Alone, she was alone; she wanted to be alone forever, deep in her mind’s endless pleasure. No one, she wanted no one, she cared for none; not Kitty, not Robin, not Myrna, not her husband, not even God. If only she could be left alone to sail the mesmerizing roars of the immense silence of her wildest seas and oceans between her ears, forever and ever, amen. She twirled and pirouetted, her long yellow hair splashing far from her nebular eyes, hands spinning above her head, reaching high to touch the heavens, she spread her legs to straddle her revolving universe, and fearing the fall, sucked in a huge gulp of dizzying air. A rush of hot air circled her naked body making her twist and shout in tune to the ancient flute sounds reverberating from the walls all around and with eyes wide open she saw spheres of perfect water droplets running down her bouncing breasts. She found the tit droplets insufficient as a sea to sail on, and popped another sugar cube, the whirling trip to be the ultimate one. Her heart and arteries pulsated more powerfully than ever before and all the neurons of her brain and body went into warp speed, a thousand times faster than the speed of unholy light. Powerful neuron pulses older than the old rainbow white stuff floating throughout her universe, older than time itself, the same old endless stuff emanating from its intensely dark source, brightly exploding from the engulfing darkness of her unconsciousness that the thoughtless mind accepts like seamless reality, all the time new-born baby signals pulsating in her devastated mind. She filled her empty glass again and drank it all in one long swallow and heard the oceans roar the dull thud of the profoundly hollow depth between her ears. Sound changed to light and became one. Everything changed to light and became one with Sharon. She was crawling through light which through the magic of her soul had been slowed to a trickle by the voyages of LSD to an everlasting eternity within her brain where everything outside it was standing stone still, durably dead and unable to keep up with the celestial pulses of her neurons. More water droplets from the sprinkler high in the sky floated forever in space too slow to keep up with the already finished splashing wondrous display within her brain. A single drop splashed on her open hand and exploded into a billion droplets baptizing Sharon in awesome rapture. She tried to catch the drops but her mind was way ahead of her senses. In full ecstasy she shut her eyes and totally withdrew inside her loving soul. Outside was sluggish ugliness, and all the beauty was inside. Shut your eyes and close the dumb world out. That boy on the bus! Where is that boy on the long ago bus to kiss my mouth with his hot, rash red lips? She lay back down on her wet bed and in the iniquity of her pleasure awaited for the righteous man to anoint her lips with his. His appearance enclosed the few faint breaths around her lips and her brain sailed deeper
into ecstasy. Lost in the sensational rhapsody of her pleasures, the notes of measured stereo music flowing through her space were derailed, they were too slow in their arrival for her over-pulsating mind to heed. Patiently she rubbed and touched herself, his image carried by the infinite photons of light years away, frozen in tantalizing slow motion; and in rapid succession, her ceiling was a fireworks display full of the spectacular. He was there, the smiling, tit teasing boy, her lifelong hallucination, chemically energized her brain barely this side of consciousness, her lovely silken yellow hair exhaustingly dangling from her head on the side of her bed.
There, where you’ve always been, deep in my heart and mind! Kiss me little boy, fuck me little boy, there are no excuses in sin. Oh fuck you little boy; you’re such a numbing baby; you haven’t changed in all these years.
In one pointless cry, Sharon screamed her adolescent disappointment of unrequited love of a dumb boy: all those years clinging to an illusion that was baby soft. High in her one-sided high, alone in her feelings only, she longed for someone to walk towards her, to cross the lovely desert that her lonely soul was now sailing towards her second birth.
She thought she heard her husband’s voice and like a balloon it completely exploded her minimal, frail retarded reality, and hissing air further emptied her mind. And with every outside sensation there was less and less recognition until everything disappeared within the whirlwind of her vacuous eyes. In the unbounded hallucination full of the infinite light, she witnessed one last thread to a disjointed reality: more sugar cubes to feed her dreams.
She dropped two more sugar cubes and finished her last resort vodka. Spinning around an unending vortex, she wanted to hymn along with the monks in her brain. She found her young monk gazing excitedly all about her, from head to toe, all around her ass, and staring rudely in adoration, just like that boy on the bus, just like all the boys throughout her life, at her outstanding forever beautiful breasts and… it was no use; she could not sustain the shattered thoughts…she swooned as he put his arms around her shoulders and let them slide down to her fabulous ass and then delicately press his sentient hand up and down her silken back, and round and round, between her thighs and she openly endured his lovely lips upon her wet nipples and her mind dizzying spun into a vertiginous fantasy; and for a long time he made exposed love to her in front of Jesus and all the other saints, before the altar of the Holy Church of the Sepulchre. She tightened her lysergic eyes to better feel the touch against her skin that covered her whole body. Lovely angelic voices sang all around their love. They started soft and deep and the melody was a prolonged ‘alleluia’, ‘alleluia’, ‘alleluia’, softly fading into the distance, caressing her soul for ages to come. In Heaven’s sweetness all external sensation blended with the ‘alleluia’, making her acid trip forever lasting. In her mind’s celestial pleasure, she found happiness and became one with her universe and in the dazzling light of creation she saw the vastness and timelessness of love. Bless me, bless me now and forever for I am yours as I’ve always been.
BF4Ever Page 28