So that’s how it ended. Ended? I’m wincing as I write that. I did love you my beautiful man and I wish I’d been nicer, but I’ll take my “what-ifs” with me and let you go.
Now where are the matches?
Maybe I’ll read through this just one last time.
THE BOYS
A. F. Harrold
A. F. Harrold was born in Sussex, but subsequently moved to somewhere less aesthetically pleasing. He is best known as a comic performance poet (Postcards from the Hedgehog, 2007) – ‘original: weird and wonderful’ Brian Patten; comedian – ‘made me cry’ Leonard Cohen; and straight poet (Logic and the Heart, 2004) – ‘brave and compassionate’ PN Review, even though he does any number of other things as well. Both the poetry books are published by Two Rivers Press. He has frequently contributed to the Erotic Review.
One of the nicest things about being a human being (I suspect it happens to all of us, now and again) is being able to give unsolicited advice about situations we have no expertise in to people who would be much better off sorting things out themselves. As a species we are nothing if not helpful. So it was last Christmas that a friend of mine was bemoaning her troubled love life – out loud in a purely rhetorical manner. She loves a man who lives the other side of the country and has had an off and on relationship with him for years, in the meantime she’s living with another chap who she is very fond of, who has all the characteristics lacking in her true love – he’s artistic and brilliant. Her first man doesn’t know she’s moved in with this second chap, even though they talk regularly and at length on the telephone. She can’t decide who to be with, or how to untangle the situation without injuring someone... and so on and on.
The solution seemed fairly obvious to me – well, a solution at least, and probably not one likely to actually work, but which it seemed to be remiss not to at least mention out of the kindness of my heart, and so I sketched out the following plan for her – an unexpected little Christmas present, if you will.
*
When you find yourself at that point in life when there are two men who long for you and for whom you long, between whom you can’t quite make up your mind, recognising in each of them certain essential qualities (kindness, creativity, madness, eagerness, loyalty, unexpectedness, enthusiasm, maturity, surprise, immaturity, indefatigable passion, fire, ruthlessness, power and searching, stretching, lusting hands, eyes and lips...)... qualities that between them, when added together, would make the contradictory, but remarkably and peculiarly perfect, homunculus you’d like to own. Added together they would never survive the unlike stresses of their combined personality, but what a moment it would be, what a thing to see.
You find yourself living with one of them, after the other, who came first, has vanished from the scene. He left you opened and unlocked, unsure and uncertain of the direction you had been travelling before he’d arrived, unable to quite pick up the trail again, to head along happily, and so you fell in with the second one, the one who had lurked on the outside, who’d always still been around. He’s the one who’s loved you for years, he’s the one who is the artist, who’s the crazy, forever leaping up to paint another abstract, to jot another poem. He fucks expressively and unexpectedly, like his art.
But living with him you find you’re thinking of the first one again; there is dissatisfaction in the home. And then he calls up. He’s been an idiot, but you knew that, and you know you’re an idiot to think of listening to him, after what he’s done and what he did. But three hours pass by in one phone call and later you go back to your artist, climb into his bed, eat his food, sleep beside him and dream of places, people and solutions that don’t exist.
*
One day you arrange these two unlikely men in one room. You bring them together to talk, to listen, to try to find an answer for yourself. Strange, because they know each other and hate each other. Their natures are contradictions, their world-views are diametric. But they’re here for you, for the one thing they have in common: a certain beat of the heart.
You’ve cleared the furniture away, moved it out to the edges of this space, this room, and the three of you stand in the centre, the men side by side and you facing them. They don’t look at each other, hands at their sides, feet a little apart, shoes scuffling. It’s almost funny how carefully they don’t look at each other, as if one glance would set fire to a fuse that would prove impossible to douse; as if there could only be one survivor, and neither one is sure it would be him.
And as if you hadn’t had a plan when they arrived, something wakes in you now. A sudden realisation lifts its head, swings its gaze, licks its finger and slowly strokes it between your legs. Your heart-rate has risen, your mouth has opened a half inch of its own accord.
As you stand there, feet apart, one hand on your hip, the other waving airily and masterfully in the air, you tell your two golden boys to undress. That seems the simplest way to get this started.
They hesitate, of course. They look at you, begin to speak, but your raised finger is the finest weapon you have and it hushes them immediately. There’s no arguing today, there’s no brooking disagreement, there is nothing at work here but your will.
The one on your right, number one, begins to unbutton his shirt; number two shrugs off his jacket, reaches down to unlace his shoes. Ah, they’re doing what you want, you think. The surge of joy that competes with the nervous realisation that there’s no step back thumps in your mouth, dries you up just as it moistens you. You shift your legs, move your weight from foot to foot as slow, loose items of clothing are tossed aside. You squeeze your thighs together, revel in the sudden heat.
With embarrassment and with the still absolute refusal to look at one another, your two men pull off the last of their clothes, let them fall on top of their respective piles and stand naked in the warm room, facing you, side by side. You know they long to look at each other, you know they do. Neither is worried who has been the best lover, who has performed better or more often in your bed – those are the concerns of teenagers, of the insecure, of the foolish. No, these two are mature enough to know there are very few things in life that are simple calculations of “better” and “worse”, that sex, like all things, runs the gamut, a full spectrum of experience. They both know that you love them, for what and who they are.
But, at the same time (because nothing is simple), you know they long to compare themselves, to know, statistically, who is bigger, who is thicker, who is leaner, who is stronger, who is... who is... These things are quantitative and are easily charted, and although they’d prove nothing, it would be a set of data they could take away at the end of the day. And you know both boys secretly like statistics, however creative or blasé they claim to be.
While they don’t look, you do. You note the difference in height. Number one is broader in the chest, but hairless. Number two, narrower, with a dark wispy cirrus that fades away as you head south, before beginning pointedly below his navel and rising like a storm cloud around his dangling, half-hard, dark cock. Number one keeps himself shaven smooth and his cock, thicker, rounder, is also harder.
You walk around them, between them. As you pass behind them you wonder what they do with their eyes. Those eyes (blue and brown) that have been locked on you. Do they meet? Do they stare ahead as if they were lined up for an inspection, waiting in a cold waiting room for the cup and the cough? You graze your eyes across their backs, across the lovely spinning globes of their buttocks, one pair plumper, one pair furrier than the other. You think of how often they’ve pistoned away between your thighs, sometimes engrossingly, sometimes dully, sometimes ineffectually and often noisily. You try to see your ankles locked in their lower backs, picture the differences, see your hands on their shoulders, gripping their ribs, pulling at their buttocks. Oh, how you long for one or either to leap you now, to pull you to the floor, to tip you, to tup you. But that’s not the plan, neither one’s to be left out.
Standing between them, an inch in advance of the
m you reach down to grip those meaty rods. Each hand fills with hot, hard-soft cock. The texture’s a delight, that skin that shifts over the stiffening iron slug inside, the strange mechanics of the thing. A blood-filled sock, locked off by a biological tourniquet at one end. You wonder whether, if you were to cut into a fully erect, tempestuously hard, bubbling with vim, prick, whether the blood, maintained under such pressure, would reach the far wall; whether it could injure, hit the ceiling, take a small child’s eye out.
You squeeze, rub your hands along, feel the rods grow hard, antithetical to a forge: as these get hotter they get harder; but later, when they reach their hottest, they too, will wilt, beaten.
They look at you, both of them turn to look at you, their eyes travelling from their own cocks, up your tanned arm, to your face, and you know that in their peripheral gaze, out of focus, is an image of the other. You know if you were to lean back, take one step back, their opposite’s face would snap into focus, spring out at them, this image of the hated other, the unlikely and unliked rival. And you also know that would ruin what ambitions you have.
You let go of their cocks, leaving them to bounce and bob in the air (like pricks must bob in the International Space Station, you think unexpectedly) before them. And without looking you reach out for their own hands, and pull them down to their own cocks. As much as you’d love to lay their hands on one another, to see these two boys of yours act in concert, in combination, you don’t do it. But you leave them to hold themselves and walk forwards, spinning on the ball of your foot a few yards away.
The picture you see when you face them is so hot that your heart skips more than one beat taking it in. These two naked lovers, these two loves, are stood, feet apart, hard cocks in hand, staring into your eyes. Embarrassment evaporates. Your cunt throbs, leaks, gapes for filling. It mouths longing into your ears, asking and asking for either one of those sweetmeats to eat: it’s not that fussy, when it comes down to it. But this isn’t the plan.
You move your feet apart and touch the crotch of your jeans. Push the seam into your cleft. You’re surprised the juice hasn’t soaked the denim. You squeeze yourself, rippling good feelings into your belly, into your spine. You tell the boys to wank and they slowly begin, each eyeing you closely as you push harder at your smooth, rich, dark delta.
You wish you had the attention to pay equally to each cock, to eye them both simultaneously, to watch each poking head, each blue-purple vein, each slow down of strokes, each pause, each new rapid jerking, the next pause, the long squeeze that begins at the balls, the little fingertip squeezes across the eaves of the head. Each little variation should be recorded, deserves to be noted and remembered, to be archived as being a unique moment. But it’s all gone on the wind, half of it unwatched, half of it forgotten.
As they stroke their eyes change, from you, from watching your eyes focused on them, to watching their own cocks (always a marvel of sorts), to being closed and then gone, who knows where.
You forget yourself for now and kneel in front of the boys, a hand held out under each pounding cock and you wait. And wait.
In time the inevitable happens: a shut eye, a sigh, a whimper and a final, squeezing jerk fills each of your palms with the strange mucous that begins life and over which lives are lost. A small puddle of the clear-white albumen slops in your palm, strings on your wrists, on your sleeve, on the floor, but the majority pools just where you want it.
The boys are aching, are weak in the knees and you command them to kneel with you. They obey, slumping to the wooden boards, their deflated cocks looking sheepish, sticky and so very human between their thighs, balls hanging toward the floor, as if sweetly overcome by gravity.
You lift each palm in turn to your nose, breathe deep of the heady aroma, the glorious, gorgeous aroma of come, that salty loving scent, somewhere near Brie, somewhere near persimmon, somewhere far out to sea. All through your life the most unexpected things have reminded you of this smell, in the most unexpected of places. But now you have the original, pooled and soon cooled in your hands.
But now you hold your hands out to the boys, one each, but swapped over, so your arms cross at the elbow, and you tell them to lap, to lick like a cat, to sup on the seed, and to your excitement they each lean forward and dip the dab-end of their tongues into the viscous mess – that surface tension hard to break, but the tart flavour quickly absorbed.
You lift your hands, push the palms into their mouths, smear their lips with come, with the sticky stuff. Watch them gag, spit, and lick it up. Each ashamed, but unable to not eat their lover’s lover’s come, neither one willing to wimp out, to be seen to be the lesser.
Soon it is impossible to know whether your palms are still sticky with come or with saliva and you wipe them, uncaringly, on the hips of your jeans as you lean forward, kiss one man after the other after the other. Savouring the smell, the taste even, the knowledge most importantly of what has happened here. These two loves, these two hates merged for a moment in three mouths – viscous, bloodless blood-brothers of a sort, for a moment, for a time.
Your face comes away sticky and wet and the heady aroma stays with you as you stand, turn and leave the room, unsure exactly what will happen next, what can happen next, but smiling like the cat that got the prize carp out of the pond onto the land, wondering if you’ll ever manage to get it home intact. Wondering if this evening will ever come up in conversation, whether either boy will remember it in the morning, or whether it will just remain one dream among many that bring a much needed, knowing smile to your life but which, in the end, turns out to not be the simple solution you were seeking after all.
But for now, you just smile.
*
As far as I know she never took my advice.
SHANDEE FINDS DAVE’S ARM
Nicholson Baker
Nicholson Baker is the author of nine novels and four works of nonfiction, including Double Fold, which won a National Book Critics Circle Award, and House of Holes, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, and The New York Review of Books. He lives in Maine with his family.
Shandee’s sister gave her all her makeup because she was going off to Guatemala. That night Shandee spent about two hours trying on lipstick. Then, the next morning, she went to a quarry with her Geology 101 class. The quarry was called the “Rock of Ages.” It was vast and they dug granite there, mostly for tombstones. The tour guide was kind of cute although his hair wasn’t good – he was maybe twenty-seven. Pretty drastically cute, though, she thought. They were standing on the brink of a space that looked like something from another planet, and he said, “There’s enough granite here to last us four thousand five hundred years.” My gracious goodness, thought Shandee, that’s a lot of tombstones. She turned away from the edge, and that’s when she saw a hand poking out from behind a rock.
While the others listened to the tour guide, she went over to the hand. The hand was attached to its forearm, and there was a clean torn cloth wrapped around the end that would have been attached to the rest of his arm. There was no blood on the cloth. Shandee picked it up and felt it. It was warm; the fingers moved a little. The hand pointed urgently at her bag, so she stuffed it inside and went back to the group and listened to the rest of the tour.
When she got home she pulled the forearm out and laid it on her bed. It was strong, with sensitive fingers and a blue vein traveling up along the muscle on the underside. She lifted it and whispered, “Arm, can you hear me?”
In answer the arm caressed her cheek with two fingers. It had a gentle touch.
Shandee said, “Are you comfortable? Do you need anything?” The arm made a handwriting gesture. Shandee found a pen and handed it over. The hand wrote, “Please unwrap the rag and feed me some mashed-up fish food in an electrolyte solution.”
“Where?” Shandee asked.
“Funnel it into the little hole with the green rim,” the arm wrote. And then: “I’m glad you found m
e.”
She unwrapped the towel and saw that the arm was capped with a sort of power pack made of black rubber. There looked to be a place for a battery and a place for waste to be discharged, and a place for nutrients to enter.
She had an intuition. “Are you Italian?”
“Half Italian, half Welsh,” the arm wrote. “I’m known as Dave’s arm.”
“Well, Dave’s arm, I’m very pleased to meet you.” They shook. Then she noticed the clock. “Oh dear. Can you sit tight here for an hour?” she said. “I promised someone I’d go to his party and I can’t bear to hurt his feelings.”
Dave’s arm scribbled something rapidly. “Sure, but – let me put on the lipstick for you,” he wrote.
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