Tackling the Team (The Vassi Collection)

by Marco Vassi

  The cycle repeated itself countless times, and although the physical manifestation was almost the same in each instance, the tone of each phrase uncovered a new modality, pointed to a different dimension, a deeper aspect. It was obvious that the process was open-ended and infinite. I don’t know how long we went on. I didn’t become tired, for it seemed that no energy was lost. Instead it passed back and forth between us, with each passage providing another purification of the erotic vibration, until the act was a single sustained hum.

  There came a point at which I suddenly knew that we had finished. Tony said nothing, remaining still and silent as he had throughout, although I never for an instant doubted his total and intense participation. It was, again, a signal from some source I could not identify which, as it were, tapped me on the shoulder and suggested that I bring the movement to an end. I lifted my face, kissed Tony on the lips, and gently raised my body, sliding my cunt off his rigid cock.

  We sat facing one another for a long time, his cock slowly sinking back into its lax downward curve, and my body’s functions returning to their normal moderate speed. The veil which had surrounded us parted slowly, and mundane reality re-asserted its mood. I stretched, and realized I was ravenously hungry.

  It was only then, as I regained a sense of my usual level of awareness, did I get a sense of just how far out I had been.

  “Tony,”‘ I said, “that was . . . “‘ I didn’t have the words.

  “Yes,”‘ he said. “I’ve never experienced it so totally and for such duration. But it bears out the textual descriptions with amazing accuracy.”‘

  I was dumbfounded to hear the man with whom I had shared such an extraordinary afternoon talk as though we had been demonstrating some proposition of theoretical physics. “Textual descriptions!”‘ I shouted, returning to my ordinary level of emotional reality with a sharp bounce, “were you fucking me or a book?”‘

  “To be precise,”‘ he said in his calm voice, “you were doing the fucking. I merely provided the stage upon which the dance could take place. In addition, it must have occurred even to your obstinately contrary mind that what has been occurring for the past five hours does not fit into any of the categories of personality.”‘

  “Five hours!”‘ I said. I turned and looked out the window. It was dark outside. “Have we been fucking for five hours?”‘ I asked. “No wonder I’m so hungry.”‘ A spurt of sentimentality gushed through me and I batted my eyelashes coyly and said, “It was wonderful, Tony.”‘

  “Good God,”‘ he said, uncoiling his legs and rolling off the bed. He stood up and bent over to massage his thighs and knees. He peered up at me, smiled warmly, and went on, “Just my luck to find my Shakti and have her turn out to be a Betty Boop devotee.”‘

  He rose to his full height, and held out his arms. I rose off the bed and went to embrace him. He held me tightly, his arms pulling me toward his hard chest.

  “Ooh,”‘ I sighed, “I was beginning to think you didn’t have any feeling at all.”‘

  He stepped back, held me at arms’ length, and let his gaze roam over my face. “Feelings are just things we have, like noses and fingers and ideas. We can enjoy them and express them, but they can never, in themselves, be the cause of anything lasting. It’s not that I don’t have feelings, but that I don’t give them any special importance.”‘

  “Not even love?”‘ I asked.

  “Love is the purest form of energy available to a human being. What we did on that bed was an inkling of that truth. In fact, sex is itself a meditation on love, no more, no less. Love is the supreme manifestation of the Force which sustains all the forms of creation. It is, and does not take an object. You and I can enter the field of love together, but it is misleading for me to say, ‘I love you’. I may love, and you may love, and if we merge our fields of energy, then we love together. The love which attaches to a specific person is only a shadow, an example, of the universal love of which everything is but a symbol.”‘

  My eyes were sparkling and my heart was full, and yet my mind resisted. “I can agree with all that as an idea,”‘ I said, “but it has no meaning unless I can feel it.”‘ I put one hand between my breasts. “Here,”‘ I added.

  “My idea, and your feeling, and our bodies. This is the triangle which lies at the core of creation. The greatest mistake a man can make is to insist that a woman think as he does; the greatest mistake a woman can make is to insist that a man feel as she does; the greatest mistake a man and woman can make together is forget that each needs the other’s body to complete the circuit of energy in which bliss is found.”‘

  He dropped his arms and stepped back. “Are you as hungry as I am?”‘ he asked, abruptly changing tone.

  We went into the kitchen and prepared a very late breakfast of eggs and home fries and toast and fruit. I found myself moving about the room as though I had lived in the apartment a long time.

  “What do you think—excuse me, feel—about moving in with me?”‘

  “I don’t know,”‘ I told him, pouring hot water over the coffee grinds. “It sounds silly to say after what we’ve been through, but I barely know you.”‘

  I realized that I had matured quite a bit since impetuously taking Jeff up on the same offer.

  “I need to think about it,”‘ I added, “but in my heart I want to say yes.”‘

  “There’s no rush to decide,”‘ he said.

  We ate slowly, and in silence. At one point, one of the hundreds of questions that had been racing through my mind came to my lips, and without considering, I asked, “Did you cum, Tony?”‘

  He laughed, the same open expression of simple pleasure, and again, it seemed to point to a joke which was utterly private to him alone.

  “I didn’t ejaculate, if that’s what you mean.”‘

  “But aren’t you frustrated?”‘

  “Not in the least.”‘

  “I don’t understand,”‘ I said, for perhaps the tenth time that day.

  “I’ll give you a couple of books to read,”‘ he told me. “It’s too tedious to explain without your having some rudimentary knowledge of the concepts I’m involved with.”‘

  I wanted to press him further, but he stood up. “There’s a program on at seven I don’t want to miss,”‘ he said.

  “Television?”‘ I asked.

  “It’s another form of meditation,”‘ he said.

  I suppose my face must have registered annoyance, for he added, “Please don’t have any preconceptions about me, Julie. I don’t want to perform for you, nor explain overmuch. Learn about me as I am.”‘

  “But it seems So odd. After what we shared today and all your talk of exalted states, how can you do something so . . . so bourgeois?”‘

  “I’m very bourgeois,”‘ he said. “I had a very conventional middle-class upbringing, a standard education, and I work at a rather routine job. I’m just an average man. Enlightenment does not stand outside history, and spirituality is nothing more than accepting one’s true nature, in all its sublime and banal manifestations. Despite the fact that I am in touch with a deeper reality, in the way I live my life I am very, very ordinary.”‘

  “And what shall I do while you’re watching the tube?”‘ I asked, sounding peevish and not really liking myself for it.

  “I don’t know,”‘ he said. “Do the dishes, maybe, or come and watch with me, or . . . whatever you like.”‘

  “Or maybe I’ll return to my place,”‘ I flung at him.

  “Please don’t threaten me,”‘ he replied softly. “I won’t fight with you. I have no desire to dominate or be dominated. I’m bored by that kind of challenge. Of course, as I’ve had to remind you a number of times, you are absolutely and unconditionally free. So you can do what you wish. But if you remain at the level of infantile intimidation, what you get in return won’t be very interesting.”‘

/>   “That’s very high-sounding,”‘ I said. “But the fact remains that you want to have your cake and eat it too. You want to stay wrapped up in your world of private fantasy—excuse me, vision—and not have me disturb you at all, and yet you want me to climb aboard your cock and fuck you silly. Pardon my crude language, but that’s the bald truth of it, isn’t it? You’re just like any other man. You want your piece of ass when you want it, and otherwise you don’t want to be bothered.”‘

  “You’re merely reformulating, in your refreshingly saucy language, the basic contradiction which defines male and female. It is my mind and your feeling locked in tension with each other. And it is only in our bodies that that duality can be resolved. I’m no more happy with that polarity than you are; but there it is, it’s one of the givens of creation, and all we can do is deal with it intelligently.”‘

  “Which means your way,”‘ I shot out.

  “It’s the way I’ve chosen, but it’s been in existence for at least five thousand years. I really can’t claim that it’s my way. When our bodies are joined, we complete the triangle. When they aren’t, we must remember not to let the inherent contradiction become antagonistic, nor pretend that it isn’t there. We must know how to be neutral, to let one another be.”‘

  He frowned for a moment, staring at the wall over my head, and then he added, “We can’t possibly solve all this right now. And there’s no point in getting so intense we wind up tied into knots. I’m going in to watch television. You can join me, or make yourself comfortable in any way you like. And if you really want to leave, I’ll drive you back.”‘

  “Oh, I wouldn’t want you to miss your program,”‘ I snapped, wondering why I was being so nasty.

  “I’m sorry that this has to happen, Julie. Believe me, I don’t relish pain and negative emotions. But if this is who we are right now, then it must be borne.”‘

  “Mr. Generosity himself,”‘ I said, my voice dripping with scorn.

  Tony came at me with total deliberation. He took three steps and was standing less than a foot away. Without breaking stride he drew back his right hand and smashed it open-palmed across my face. I half-fell off the chair from the impact.

  “I’ve asked you for nothing,”‘ he said, his face a mask of controlled anger. “I’ve been honest with you. I probably saved your life. And this afternoon I gave you some inclination of what real sex could be. On top of this I have offered you my apartment, and have tried to remain reasonable while you have lacerated me with anger, sarcasm, and threats. All this after I allowed myself to become vulnerable to you. You have behaved like some debased and vicious criminal. And now you demand, with an arrogant toss of your head, that I somehow entertain you, that I have no right to do what I want but must provide for your whimsical desires, as though I were a court jester and you a queen. It’s not like that, Julie, and whether you have been chosen for me by destiny or not, if you can’t exhibit at least a minimum of simple, decent human concern, then you can put your rags back on your shoulders and crawl back to the animals who used you and discarded you last night.”‘

  With that he turned sharply on his heel and walked into the next room.

  I sat for a long time, a swirl of mixed feelings and inchoate thoughts, my body still throbbing from our extraordinary fucking, my face burning from his slap. I felt paralyzed. To leave at the moment would have been heartbreaking, to stay painful. If I fought to maintain my integrity, Tony and I would be at one another’s throats. If I submitted, I would despise myself eventually. Despite the fact that this relationship came couched in a vastly different vocabulary, offered a highly sophisticated eroticism, and promised total individual freedom for each of the partners, underneath all that the same old man-woman mechanics were at work, tapping out the same message: you can’t live with the opposite gender, and you can’t live without it.

  I got up and walked toward the next room, uncertain of what I would do. But as I reached the doorway, Tony stepped up to the same spot, coming from the opposite direction.

  “Tony,”‘ I said, “why is it so difficult?”‘

  “It’s not difficult,”‘ he said, cheerfully, “it’s impossible.”‘

  “Then what are we going to do?”‘

  “Well, I’m going in to get a soda and then watch the rest of this program.”‘ He kissed me on the forehead. “I won’t be your father, Julie. I suffer from the process easily as much as you do. I have all I can do to keep myself together in the face of life. I can’t save or rescue you.”‘

  And in that instant I did understand. I had been nagging Tony because unconsciously I expected the man to take the lead, to give the answers, to come along on the white horse. And yet if he had done so, I would have hated him for condescending to me. And throughout all our changes, he steadfastly refused to play that part, and kept reminding me that I had to find my own source of salvation within myself.

  I looked up at him and smiled, and in our exchange of glances we said all that had to be said, for that crisis at any rate.

  “Let’s get some soda,”‘ I said. “And go watch television. It must be a fantastic program to pull you in there with such force.”‘

  “It’s an old-fashioned love story,”‘ he said, “about a man and a woman and their choice between romance and marriage.”‘

  “Oh,”‘ I replied, “a comedy.”‘

  But although we sat contentedly on the couch, holding hands and sipping our cokes, looking for all the world like any pair of newlyweds caught up in one another’s vibration, a separate center had been born within me, an unsleeping eye. Without being able to pinpoint the precise second, somewhere during the year I had lost my innocence, and sometime during the night I had become aware of the fact.

  I glanced over at the man sitting next to me, his face a show of shadow and light. Never had I been so close to a man, and never so distant at the same time.

  I turned my head and watched the screen, wondering about the future, ready to open myself entirely to life, which had become something terribly real, fierce, vast, awesome, as necessary and as alien as the mysterious chasm between woman and man, the abyss which alone makes union possible.

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright 1993 by Marco Vassi

  ISBN 978-1-4976-3504-3

  This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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