The Mammoth Book of Erotica presents The Best of Michael Hemmingson
Page 19
I woke up with a short scream. I stopped myself. I was sweating. It was dark in the room. I was naked.
“What is it?” Zina said. “Superhero, what is it?” She pulled me to her breast.
“Dreaming,” I said.
“Hush.”
“I was having a bad dream.”
“Hush.”
“I was dreaming of an angel.”
“Angel?”
“A dead angel.”
“Angels don’t die,” she said.
“I thought I saw a dead angel, not too long ago.”
“Go back to sleep, Nicky.”
We lay there for a while.
“Are you asleep?” she asked.
“No.”
“You were dreaming again.”
“With eyes open,” I said.
“Now I have angels on my mind,” she said. “Could I be an angel? I could really fly then. With wings. Do you know what the beauty of angels is?”
“No.”
“They have no self-pity.”
Zina and I started to make love, in her bed, and she stopped me, a hand on my chest – “Wait.”
“What?”
“Why are you here?”
“Why do you ask?”
“Maybe,” she said, “I like to ask questions.”
“I’m here,” I said, “because I want to be here.”
“I was hoping for a different answer,” she said.
“Like what?”
“Kiss me.”
I did.
“That was a peck,” she said.
I kissed her again.
“Why are you here?” I said.
“Because this is my apartment and I live here,” she said.
“Tell me what’s wrong,” I said. “Something is wrong.”
Zina looked away from me. “Things are getting different. We’re seeing more of each other. I’m sorry. I think I forgot all the moves somewhere: how to budge, how to speak, how to make eye contact. Been a while since I’ve been in a relationship. Maybe I’m afraid of doing the wrong thing. Maybe I don’t want to do anything at all. Maybe I don’t know what to do.”
“Don’t do this,” I said.
“What?”
She was looking at her lava lamp, next to her computer. “Come here and look at this.” She went to the lamp.
“What is it?”
“Come and look.”
I joined her.
“That glob in there,” she said, pointing to the lamp, “it almost looks like a person. Like a person looking at me.
“Seems just like a glob of lava lamp lava to me,” I said.
“I see a person.”
“What person?”
“You.”
“Me?”
“Don’t you see yourself?”
“Well,” I said, “no.”
“What are you doing in my lava lamp?”
I reached for her – “Trying to get out so I can fuck you.”
She pushed me away, hard. I fell on the floor.
“Get out of my lava lamp,” Zina said.
“Hey,” I said.
She sat on the floor with me. She looked at me. She said, “Can I tell you something, Nicky?”
“Now?”
“Something I want to tell you,” she said.
“I’m listening,” I said.
“I went crazy, once,” she said.
“Crazy?”
“I mean –”
“It happens to us all.”
“Nicky –”
“It’s a crazy world,” I said, “and a dirty one.”
“Listen to me, I’m serious.”
“OK.”
“I wasn’t right in the head. This head: you see my head? I don’t know what went wrong. Something went wrong with this head. I was really paranoid, like all those conspiracy people who think the United Nations are going to invade America. Well that’s an arcane reference. I should shut up. No, I won’t. I was convinced everyone was talking about me behind my back – my co-workers, my friends. I had just gotten out of this relationship with an older man –”
“How much older?”
“Older. He was – I told you about him. A professor here. He was divorced.”
“OK.”
“That’s really a different story for a different time. What was I saying?”
“People were talking about you.”
“Oh.”
“Were they?”
“Thought so. I mean, people do talk about you when you’re not around, and I was obsessed. It was driving me crazy. Crazy. I – couldn’t sleep.”
“What were they saying?”
“The usual shit.”
“Back-stabbing? The kind of people who smile in your face and stick a huge knife between your shoulder blades every chance they can get? Know the type,” I said.
“No. Well, yes, I don’t know,” she said. “Stop interrupting me,” she said. “It was a major problem, especially when the billboard ads starting talking to me.”
“Billboard ads?”
“Everywhere I went,” Zina told me, “I was convinced billboard ads were delivering subliminal messages just to me. Specifically to me, you see. They were telling me things, like what these people were doing, how I was displaced in the universe.”
I asked, “Who were sending you these messages?”
She replied, “Spiritual beings, aliens in UFOs, some kind of strange creatures – and then they started to invade my lava lamp and talk to me from there.”
“Sounds like a problem.”
“Somewhere deep down I kept telling myself this wasn’t real. I knew it wasn’t real. Finally, I went to get help. I went and saw a hypnotherapist.”
“You were hypnotized?” I said.
“Oh, yes. It did me a world of good.”
“You were cured?” I said.
“Yeah. I’m not crazy now, am I?”
“No.”
“I used to be.”
“How long were you . . . ?”
“A few months.”
“But you’re OK now?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Good,” I said.
“So,” she said.
“So,” I said.
“Now that you know I used to be crazy,” she said, “do you still want to sleep with me?”
“I’d be crazy not to.”
TWELVE
I began to enter Zina’s world of pain: her delight.
I was touching, caressing her breasts. I pinched her nipples, which were hard; I pinched lightly.
“Pinch them harder,” she said.
I did.
“Harder,” she said.
I was afraid I’d hurt her.
“I want the pain,” she said, “it makes me horny.”
She gave an example. She got up, found a pair of clothespins in a cabinet in the kitchen, and placed a clothespin on each nipple. With the clamping down on each nipple, she took in a deep breath, almost like a hiss.
“Fuck,” she said.
“You like that,” I said.
“Yes, yes,” she said. “Take them off.”
I did, quickly.
“Put them back on.”
I did, and this time I took delight, watching the pins squeeze into her flesh.
“Ahh, fuck,” she said.
I took one off.
“Now use your fingers.”
I took the nipple in question between two fingers.
“Squeeze,” she said.
I squeezed.
I started to become quite good at choking her while we fucked, whether she was on her belly or on her knees or stomach. Repetition makes you better. I also started to enjoy this activity. I was never quite sure if it was mental or physical for Zina, but as long as it got her off and made her happy, it made me happy.
We started biting one another, soft at first, then harder, sometimes until we drew blood from each other’s punctured flesh, fragile as anything in the univers
e. The biting was not just into the body, but into the soul.
We were in bed, holding each other.
“Are we getting very serious?” Zina said.
“It feels like it,” I said.
“Is this OK with you?” she said.
“Yes,” I said. “You?”
“Yes,” she said. “Very,” she said.
“I have something,” Zina said, standing naked before me.
“Yeah?”
“Something I want you to use on me,” she said.
She went to her closet, and produced a cat o’nine tails. I’d seen such a flogging device in magazines, in movies.
“Where’d you get that?” I asked.
“I’ve had it a while,” Zina said. “I want you to use it on me,” she said.
It was black and ominous. She handed it to me. She lay on her stomach, on the bed. “Use it on my back,” she told me, “use it on my ass, my legs.”
I did so, lightly, uncertain.
“It’s OK to start off soft,” she said, “but increase your strength. Gradually. I want you to get to a point where you could almost make me bleed.”
I did this. I hit her with the cat o’nine tails, just as she said: her back, her ass, her legs. She seemed to like it best on her ass. I started to get into it. I started hitting her harder, the smack of leather against flesh. Harder. She began to cry out with each blow. Tears in her eyes. She wanted more. Welts were beginning to form on her ass, the back of her legs. I concentrated on her back, till welts formed there.
“OK,” she said. “Stop.”
I stopped. I, too, was almost out of breath.
“Now get on me,” she said, “fuck me: I can’t stand it, fuck me!”
I entered her from behind, I reached over to choke her. We fucked for a bit, then she turned around. She put her legs on my shoulders.
“Slap me,” she said.
I raised a hand.
“Slap me.”
Fucking her, I slapped her, hard, across the face.
She just looked at me, some blood on her lip. “Not that hard,” she said.
“I’m sorry,” I said, reaching down and licking the blood away.
“Slap me again,” she said.
I did, but not as hard.
Zina bought toys several days a week, usually at thrift stores, sometimes at the toy store. She loved her children’s toys, and so did Moby Dick.
She had adult toys hidden under her bed, and it wasn’t until a month after we’d been seeing each other that she brought them all out, and wanted to share them with me.
Anal beads, large double-sided black dildos, a dog collar, other assorted rubber penetrating devices. While Zina liked the beads or my fingers in her ass, she didn’t care for anal sex all that much. She wasn’t into ass-licking, pissing, or even swallowing my come. She liked pain, she liked to whack her clit off, she liked me to choke her. It was easy to get into what she enjoyed, as I got into any woman’s pleasure, however alien it was to me. I adapted well.
“Once,” Zina told me, in the dark, in bed, “I was so full of myself, I wanted to colonize my own psyche; I wanted to chase the message owl across fields unfamiliar. I wanted to fly because I was born with wings and I was angry at God for not allowing me to fly.”
Being with a poet can sometimes shed new light on pretension.
Zina didn’t like to hang out at the bar with McGinnis and his crowd. She didn’t think McGinnis cared for her, and she didn’t care all that much for him, either. “All those people are from fiction,” she said. “I’m from poetry.” Only now did I start recognizing the split in the English Department within genres, especially those in comparative literature, rhetoric and writing. All the time I’d been attending this school and only now was I noticing the petty in-fights, jealousies, the mini soap operas. “Do you know what kind of reputation McGinnis has?” Zina said.
“He’s well known,” I said.
“As a womanizer, as an iconoclast. He’s not classical in his approach.”
“But his books!”
“They don’t make sense.”
“He’s helped me,” I said.
“I know he has,” Zina said, taking my face in her hands. “He’s your friend.”
“I love you,” I said.
“I love you,” she said.
I’m not sure how it started; it wasn’t even talked about. Zina said something like, “It’s silly for you to be paying rent on your place when you’re always over here.” Gradually, my possessions began making their way to her apartment. I gave her money for rent. We bought groceries together. We went to bed at the same time, and got up together. She cooked breakfast and we had breakfast together.
I knew it was over, the night I got really drunk: we had this fight. I don’t know what the fight was about. We were fighting more and more, and I was drinking more.
My car was in the downstairs garage. I went into the garage door, got into my car, and floored it, going in reverse. I forgot the main door was down. I smashed right into it. I sat there in the car, in the alley, and thought: shit, I just ruined the garage door.
I laughed. It was like something out of a Raymond Carver story, something Bukowski would’ve done in a drunken stupor.
“OK,” I said, “I gotta write a story about this.”
Zina came down, wearing a robe. “What have you done?” she said.
“Oops,” I said.
“You better pay for this,” she said.
Oh, I would.
After she calmed down about the door, I went to her for comfort. I was shaking. I tried to hug her. She was cold. We went to bed. “Tie me up,” she said. I tied her wrists to the metal railing of the bed, and then her ankles to the other railing. I got out the small black whip (a new toy) and went to work on her flesh. I made her bleed. I fucked her from behind. I put it in her ass, much to her seeming protest. I choked her, harder than I’ve ever choked her. She was coughing at the end, her face red, her body shaking.
“Why haven’t you ever fucked me like that before?” she wanted to know.
THIRTEEN
The image I have of her (this image will always stay with me) – and I wanted to tell her this as she sat behind the wheel of her car, driving (I was in her car and she was driving) – was an image of Zina surrounded by her toys, a milieu of toys, the toys she liked to buy and play with: filling the empty spaces of our apartment with.
Zina was driving and we were going to Los Angeles. I was surprised how little traffic there was on Interstate 5; usually there were many cars clogging, the slow march of machines, especially on a summer night, so many people coming or going. We were going, Zina and I, but we were not going to the same place. Places have divisions, spaces that are hard to fill, no matter how many toys you buy from the toy store to make up for some memory or lack thereof.
This is what I knew about her, or this could’ve been mere assumption – and the image of her that sticks like hot glue to the fingertips of my reverie is Zina as I saw her one night, the night I went to our apartment (when we were going to the same place together and everything was OK and we both seemed happy) and she had bought a bag full of the alphabet ($1 at the thrift store) with magnets on each letter, the colored letters I seem to recall having played with when I was a very small person. “Look! look!” she said: with glee and like a small person, and she said, “Help me with them,” an invitation to play. She tore open the plastic bag the colored letters were contained in; they scattered across the floor of her kitchen like stupid human dreams forever lost in a car crash. She went to her knees, told me to come to her: play, help, fight. She started putting the letters on the white refrigerator, where she had a color print of a happy smiley face woman with large eyes and the caption HOME HONEY, I’M HIGH and two postcards, one of a brunette holding a gun and shooting, another of a man with a gun, an image from the movie Reservoir Dogs. There was a mixture of delight and anxiety on her face; she looked at me and said, “Won’t you help me?”
“No,” I said, “there’s nothing silly about this,” and so we were like two children frantically picking up the alphabet from her floor – letters that I thought would any moment now get up and dance – oh, God, a memory – sticking them to the door of the fridge. Merriment, yes, a small one’s joy on her small triangular face and when I looked at the kitchen table which had a lot of other toys, used and new, I felt sad again; I knew there was something missing. Something was missing from her past (something was missing from mine) and something was missing between us, yet another space to be filled, a vacuous interior needing intestines.
“You buy so many toys,” I said. I sat down at the table and played with a dinosaur.
Zina looked at her letters, arranged them in a way she liked better. “Yes, I do,” she said.
She sat in my lap, like she always did, arms around my neck and looking down at me with her dark eyes, dark circles under her eyes – my face pressed against her breasts, the smell of her now on me, that smell which was not perfume but some men’s cologne I never heard of that mixed well with her skin and gave her the smell I knew I’d forever associate her with, an invasion of my psyche: my memory of Zina.
She kissed me on the lips, she kissed me on the forehead. “Just think,” she said, “I keep collecting more and more toys; we’ll never have to buy toys for our children.”
What the hell was she talking about?
I looked at Zina next to me, Zina’s hands on the wheel tonight, going north, going to LA – she to her brother’s, me to a reading I didn’t really want to do. She wasn’t going to come to the reading with me.
I wanted to tell her that I’d hoped this time it would be different, she wouldn’t just be another woman to jump into my pool and splash and leave and never come back. I wanted to tell her what was on my mind., what was in my heart. But, in my heart, I knew it was over between us.
My staring at her was making her feel uncomfortable; she looked at me and said, “What?” then looked back at the freeway.