A Matter of Love in da Bronx

by Paul Argentini

  Idiotic question!

  What if...what if you found out just what kind of a lover you were with Mary? If you turned out like terrific, that would be great. No problem. But, what if you were a dud? One big, rousing Bronx cheer? A real fizzler? A nothing? Would she put up with it? Or tell you to get lost?

  Through the morning that thought--the thought that Mary could actually not want to see him any more; with the two of them existing on the same planet not together, with the thousands of mini-scenes he conjured of the two of them in a moment of lovemaking not to ever take place--was the source of the fibrillations and high anxiety that steamed his brain to the hue of a Maryland Blue.

  --The hook! I'll take the hook.

  --What? What did you say?

  --Mary! Oh! Sweetheart! Glad be I to hear thy voice.

  --I don't know what you're saying, but I've had to wait so long to use the phone I'm already late to get back to work that I've haven't got three seconds.

  --If you have just three seconds, give me just three words...

  --I can't. Someone's nearby.

  --I love you. I adore you!

  --Sam, I must go. Please don't interrupt. I have just a second. Don't come down. I won't see you... There was interference in his brain. All he heard were her words: "...no more...," missing the last word, "...time..."

  The dead-drone on the phone turned to a beeping when the words he heard sunk in, the world came with them on top of him. He needn't worry any longer whether or not he could perform the act of love with Mary; whether he would be adequate, satisfactory; and whether or not this subconscious concern is what kept him from leaping when the opportunity was given. All unnecessary psychological gymnastics. His worst fears filled the shop completely as if with phosgene gas to which all rational thought succumbed. His emotions had one gigahertz of lucidity before they reacted like a computer dunked in oil. Fssssstttttzzzzzz! Blankscreen.

  The arena. Bright sun. Hot sand underfoot. Gawking people faces hotdogs indermouth. Body parts about. Big, soaked bloodleaks. Walk the murderous walk about the dying stations to know what is your due. The hapless on hold to wait your words of solace as unto them they do. With firepots. Chopping blocks. Tearing poles. Pinching nippers. Breakingbonebars. Barbed whalehooks. Beating chains.

  --You! Who are about to be tortured to death! Do you want to live forever! Watch me! And learn how a man dies!

  Sam stopped before the beautiful girl with yellow hair who looked at him with adulation, hope. Her blink brought the axe down with it, her hand flying from her arm at the wrist. Sam left the stump covered with his vomit.

  Sitting on a toilet seat one story high, the man's eyes an entreaty for mercy, which he got. His carriage shot downwards, sitting him flat on the sand impaled on a pole that came out of his skull. Sam moved on, a ventriloquist, screaming for the corpse.

  No, Sam was not hungry for the freshly eviscerated liver, his eyes too taken with the still beating heart hanging out between melony tits.

  Then, he was looking into lad's eyes gaping back at his aside the funnel stuck deep in the throat into which went the fuming, boiling lead.

  --Fuck you, World! Sam looked about at the gleering, loathsome spectators. Do your damndest. I died some few words ago:

  --I won't see you no more, she said. They descended to pluck out hair by hair, and inch by inch peel him bare of skin before rolling him in salt. Ryam.

  SMELL. It cupped her face, stuffing her nose and mouth. Mary never experienced the pungency of it before, yet she identified it instantaneously. Sex. Fuckdoing. It thickened the air with its mucosity. Was it compellingly exciting? Or odious? Before she could decide, she found herself struggling to take in the scene that smashed itself into her eyes.

  Gina answered her knock, opening the door, a snatched blouse barely covering her nude self.

  Mary slipped into the room.

  --Gina...!

  --Aunt Mary! I'm so glad you came! Her kiss was hard, sincere.

  The taste on her niece’s cheek--salt, perspiration, mixed with man's overheated saliva--plummeted directly to her labia. She took in the room, the dynamized atmosphere barely in ebb. Then, the roguish smile on the face of the blackhaired, strongbodied man on the hideabed. He was just able to cover himself with the sheet. His head was propped up on one hand, the other waved.

  --Hello, Aunt Mary!

  --Hello, yourself! Of course I had to come, Gina! I've been so concerned about you, so delighted to get your call today! How handsome! How gorgeous he is! What must it be like to make unbridled love with so stunning a creature? How exciting! How terribly envious I feel! Were they in the middle of...? Or did they just...finish? The smell says they've been at it for hours. Seems they haven't stopped for breakfast, lunch or dinner.

  --Don't look so concerned, Auntie! I asked you to come here because I want you to meet my husband! The doctor! The doctor! Remember? The doctor I told you about? Yes! Isn't it thrilling! We were married two? Three? Days ago? I lost track...

  --I'm so happy for you! How lucky she is... All the years I've lost. If only Sam and I had found each other early, too. So much bliss we've missed. I don't know what I'm supposed to feel. What a scene! Gina's covering her boobs, yet I can see her pubic hair and ass, and he...what? Did he fall asleep? By knowing him, know all Man. Does not all semen smell the same? The slick lubrication emitted by her genitalia. Their spit. Their sweat. All the juices of their lovemaking intermingling on, in, around them. Gina! If I'd known I'd have brought more than just Baretti's chocolates!

  --Oh! No! This is great! I'm famished. I don't think we've eaten in weeks! This is how a doctor lives. He's finishing his residency in August. He's been on duty the last three days, and coming with me...Hee-hee!...every chance he could. He's asleep again. Every single second he could he gets, he corks off. He can use the rest, he has to go back in about...let's see...in about twenty minutes. This is only one room, but it's big enough for what we need it for. Only temporary, until I get a check, and he starts his practice...

  Mary's vision was frozen. He had shifted slowly, the sheet slipping from his torso, revealing his erect penis. She watched the wet highlighted organ throb. --You...you went to...to...

  --Yes, with the money you loaned me! To see my mother's attorney who... Gilda followed her gaze. ...who said he'd send me whatever money I needed to go to school, so your mother and father can't do a thing about it, especially now that I'm married...

  I'm not watching an X-rated film now. This is the real thing. I'm really here. She was mesmerized by the swollen organ standing out so brazenly. My God! Does Gilda really take that thing into her? I wonder what it would be like to have it put inside me? If I could only take off my clothes, and lay down beside him to fondle and kiss so marvelous a piece of man... What am I saying? I wish it were Sam! And we were alone! In just such a room! My God! What am I saying? I should be embarrassed, but here I am taking it all in! I just can't stop staring at his fucking hard-on! Look at it! Look at the size of it! I've never seen one...in real life! What a strange piece of sculpture. And that's what I feel when Sam is against me.

  Gina smiled, and quite casually tiptoed to the side of the bed, letting the blouse fall away from her. For Mary it presented the two nude lovers in frisado. Gilda lay back on the bed beside him, her legs spread wide in welcome; the dream man rose high over her, one hand resting by her shoulder, the other by her armpit; Gilda reached up to embrace him, lifting herself until her bosom pressed into his; his hips moved down as her ankles crossed at his buttocks; Gina and he simultaneously thrust toward each other, rammed his swollen cock losing itself in her pulsing, heated cunt dripping of love juice; they moved apart, they moved together, they kissed, they sucked, they gasped. The stop-action speeded up, the lovers fucking each other in earnest until to Mary it was all a blur. --He just grabbed me, and kissed me, and married me! We love each other so much. Gilda looked down at him. Isn't he beautiful? And not just his cock...and he does such wonders with it. It's huge, and h
urts sometimes, but I love it. I think we're going to fuck each other to death before the week is out... She reached over with the gentleness of a mother's hand to pull the sheet over him. Now that I have him, that's all I want of the world: love, loving, lovemaking. I'll never have enough. Aunt Mary, just talking about him makes me want him again. He excites me so. He has to leave, then I can take you to dinner. Would you mind? Waiting? In the bathroom?

  Mary deliberately put her back into the wall at the bottom of the stairs of the hospital apartment house. Why should she have consented to be placed in a torture chamber where the sounds of their fucking would fill her ears as the smell of their doings assaulted her nose, and did strange things to her sex? She closed her ears, put her head hard against the wall, and took it in, feeling every single sensation. It was just unbelievable that she was coming. With the last twitch in her vagina she wondered if she would carry the sex smell with her into the subway where everyone would know. Where it would cause men to have erections. Where they would throw her down in the middle of the car and gang fuck her. Despite the fresh air the sex remained in her olfactory’s, savoring it, proud to read the knowing look of men and women on the subway who seemed to smile and nod that finally the fritilaria had come out of her cocoon. And perhaps it would be a fine condition for her to be oozing of sex, toting the smell, in which to surprise Sam in the shop. Who knows what could happen? And if it would. They--she and he--like Gina and husband one day soon could try to fuck themselves to death in a week, God willing. Sam! Get ready! Here we come!

  But Sam would have none of it eyes, Lou's arguments too weak to penetrate his emotional blackout curtain. He remained limp, defeated, his head hanging nearly between his knees just as Lou found him when he walked into the shop. Then, Lou appealed to his rational, funny self and penetrates his emotional blackout curtain and asked what kind of a woman would say she didn't want to see him no more?

  --No more! What kind of language is 'no more?' 'I don't want to see you no more? You'd think she was a fucking ignorant, red-necked rebel!

  Right.

  Then he admonished himself to get his head out of his scotum.

  CHAPTER 36

  LOVE'S SUBLIMITIES send spasms through my soul. Sublunary sensibilities are pitched by the wayside. Arcane and ardent combusts the fire. You are at the core of the heat of it. So? It is you, is it? It is you. It is you. It is you. Mary. How dare I hold so precious what must be unpossessable? Is it that Nature decrees this profound feeling be enigmatical lest its fragile though worthy foundations be compromised? How clever is this bridge-barrier, occluding us, yet, enclosing us. The genius on one level preserves the genus of perpetual continuity by putting in darkness our need and reasons to participate in the ritual. We are as stones rolling down a hill. We do as we must do. No escape. Oh! Some of us do reveal its weakness. A psychological schism, part of the gossamer that ties together intelligent specie where aberrations are inherent in the production line. Sexless. Sexfearing. Loose cocks. Loose cunts. Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndromers. AIDS-aiders. Unchildbearing beings. The majority of us operate on two levels. One that drives us to copulate with the opposite sex for the mere sake of fun-fucking. Spurt enough seed there's bound to be enough to keep the kind going. Millions of fish eggs. Billions of seeds. Billidominions of larvae. No huge star striking Earth sending up clouds of dust to decimate dinosaurs and such. They just got too big and lazy to fuck. It had to be a catastrophe to take something like that off automatic. I mean, take a man and a woman, of any age, who had never before seen or knew of anyone of the opposite sex, and put them alone together, Bang! First thing! They'd start fucking. Just like that, with no tutoring or guidelines. That's basic. That's natural. That's Nature. The second level is the pseudo-intellectual-emotional. We'd like to think we know and understand all about love. Oh! Sure! Ask any of the psychists. They'd give you what they thought was chapter and verse, but, just once, let them fall madly, passionately in love--amazing how their answers disappear; lobotomized as everyone else. But, that's not good enough for me. I can't settle for that, Mary, my love. To singularize this passion for you, I must understand it more. To do that, I must reveal myself to you. In doing that, I know of myself. Perhaps, in knowing myself may I understand what explodes forth from me, this entablature of life supported on pilasters of euphoria? If not the most vital of life, certainly the most noticeable of its properties. First of them is birth. That is the beginning of the beginning. What do I know of that? I deem myself to think I can recall my essence not just of my infancy, but of my existence in the womb, as well as my passage into the world. Well though I would like to believe that, I have little else to go on. In all truth, the start of me remains a mystery. Last of them, if we may skip a few, will also be a black unknown: death. I will leave no diary on this. How gross to accept a collect call from a corpse even from one who would reveal all sorts of secrets. Then, there is their cousin, sleep. We don't make much of this because we do it so often, and though we have explanations we really aren't satisfied. What remains? Work, play, food and love. Love is what I've been after all along. I wonder if in understanding love, I would come to understand all life. Or, I wonder, if in the pursuit of it, I should lose the essence of it? With good reason I wonder that because it seems to be so fragile, double-sided. A careless word, a forgotten moment, a mindless act is enough--for some--to flashfreeze the ardor. Yet, how it can withstand all attack! Imagine Juliet in the balcony scene telling Romeo, --Oh! Go away, and stop disturbing my sleep. My parents say you're below my station, and unworthy of my attention... Lovers who have listened to other than the rhapsody in their hearts were never lovers. But, even those who hear the elegy are merely on the second level which requires that love to be part of their lives because it's so vital to life. Thus, we call it romance--if the first is physical--which discriminates not between the sexes. Love, the sport of life, how pleasurable to play it. For men the pursuit, for women the fulfillment, for both the attention. Survive without it we can, but what a scoriated flat of clay our world. And what a variety of this love: pretend, actual, and inflated. We pretend love--and we know it!--because it's better than nothing, at least we're participating, which is quite something. Inflated love is closer to fiction because we don't realize how large we make it for the effect, less on ourselves more for others. Love based on the production of envy is colored, too, like mold. Actual love comes to the rest of the lucky world. We always know it. We rarely appreciate it. It roves an unmarked, ragged expanse with nebulous boundaries between logic and emotion with constant new vistas and inconstant intensity, lasting for longer or shorter periods of time. ...Then, we have the rarest of loves: my love for you about which I could say all, and not say enough. What comes to my mind, here, now, past midnight, as I lay in darkness, dressed, across my bed, after hours of thoughts rocketing across the sky of my mind; after contacting my feelings like a hummingbird working a fieldful of coral bells; after daring to indulge myself in the essence and existence of this love for you; is the confounding thought: How do I satisfy the perplexing requirements of this love? It occludes yet includes, yes? To hold you I must release you. Also it asks that we give, yet, too, that we take. How do I do that? Give so you may receive. A paradoxical parable I understand that compares temporal expectations versus beneficent worldly comforts. How wily. The work of blackguards. Honesty is the word I want to use, to the giving and receiving of the like kind. It's this reciprocity that's the essence of a magnificent love. Now, here, tell me, is it beyond my own manipulation? Does the possibility of that artificiality pollute its purity? I wonder here if the movement is back and forth or round and round, the first a weigh and check and the latter a flow. I like the idea of a self-perpetuating, mutual growth where everything I give to you leaves a space where everything you give to me fills it completely. The more I love you, the more you love me. The more love I give to you, the more I take back. Nice. More the marvel is that this is all new to me. I've never loved before. I've thought and wondered abou
t it, to be sure, but with a certain ease. I've never had a suit tailor made--I know I will one day just as I knew I'd fall in love one day--yet I know I need only announce myself to a tailor, and he'll do the rest. Is it that simple with love? Just...let it be? Here, I love. I am in love. I love you. I am submerged in love, never to emerge from its effect, never to be the same. Should I wonder that some experience would stand me in good stead? No, I'd rather the sharp, bright, wholesome thrill of the totally new. I find every moment an excitement. I find every moment different. I find every moment compelling. One desire that never changes is to be with you constantly, completely, combined. How can I not think of tomorrow night? No platonic affair this for I carry a perpetual erection can you believe not with a view to thrusting, ramming orgasms, but for the verymost physical proximity to you. Your tongue deep inside me; me up high within you; fused together for days, weeks; completing the circle, spinning out to space; unable for me to tell where is the you of us, for you to tell the me of you, for us to be the I, complete, perfect as the genesis of the universe itself. How I agonize for your presence. I want you to be here just to be here. And more. To undress you so I may kiss you all over. To caress you. To have you share the heat of us. My heart stops when I think of where we'll be in a few long hours. My body, will it please you when you look at me? When you touch me? Will it please? When I hold, and look, and kiss you...Ah! I'm trembling! Anxious. Nervous. Anticipating. Have I dreamed too long, too much for such a dream? Perhaps I should've asked Lou exactly what I should do. Is there a way to start? Are there just certain things one doesn't do? It can't be like the hardcore movies I watched where the hard-on comes out, and the charge begins? There must be some gentility involved, isn't there? Don't be a jerk. From the President's wife to a hillbilly whore a fuck's as personal as you can get, but when it comes to romance, just don't wait for the wrong moment to fart. I keep going over and over it in my mind everything right up to the split second before I'm about to feel myself enter you. There, you let me slip in between your legs, your arms clutching me so tight, your kiss stoking hot the fire within me, your legs close around me, they start to draw me toward you; closer, closer goes my raging cock ever close to those lips of Paradise...