Al's Well

by Dark, Gregory

  “I just blah-di-blahed him. I was shameless. I just … you know … like I say, blah-di-blahed him. I didn’t care. I didn’t frigging care. All I cared about was him … it … him and it … no, it could have been anyone … anyone’s … But I needed it. Him. Anyone. Needed all three of them badly. Immediately. Nothing else mattered.

  “Did it matter whether it was good for him? Did it even matter that it was him? I don’t know. Probably not, at that moment. Anyone’s, like I say, it could have been. At that moment. Probably. Probably, at that moment, I couldn’t cared less.

  “You know, it didn’t even matter whether or not I came. Not right then. I’d had all these mini-blah-di-blahs. I was okay with that. I just didn’t want to be empty. Not any more.”

  +++

  It was, I remember, fairly unceremonious, our mutual striptease. I’m not sure the judges would have given us too much for artistic merit. It all happened in a sort of blur, a sort of hazy flash. One minute we were there all deshabille and I had your breast in my mouth. And the next, we’re both stark naked, and you’re ... well, I’m sure you remember. I don’t want you to think I’m gloating!

  It suddenly became all so urgent. I wanted you to come. I was desperate that you came. I really wanted you to want sex with me. Again, I mean, and again. And, so I thought, if you came, you would. Want sex again with me. We’re so shallow, us men. We think sex is about orgasm, only about it. Why do we find it so hard to learn from women?

  +++

  “I never blah-di-blah … you know … dah-di-dahly! I almost never do. I did then. I … you know … again and again and again. As old Julius might have said: ‘Veni, veni, veni.’ I ‘veni’d’ so heavily, so intensely, so many times that I drowned my knowing when he did.

  “I’d had ... you know … ‘venis’ like that before. I’m not trying to make this into something it wasn’t. I mean, even then I knew I’d had ‘venis’ like that before. I’ve no need to turn it into something it wasn’t. Because what it actually was, that was special enough. That was different and exotic and erotic enough. Even fairy-taley enough. Thing was, though, though I knew I’d had ‘venis’ like that before, I couldn’t remember when.

  “In the early days with Al, of course. A couple of guys when I was in my early twenties. But, Jeez, it was so long ago. It was all, all of it, just so frigging long ago.

  “Did I tell you I’d been yadi-yadahing all week? …

  “This is so not me. So giantly not me, I can’t begin to tell you. Either me yadi-yadahing or me telling you about it. But, hey, when the cat’s out the bag, there’s no point trying to get the sucker back in, no? I’m just using this thing, this blah-di-blah, yadi-yada thing, for those things I’m kinda uncomfortable with … or around … you know. (Well, I guess you probably figured that one out for yourself, am I right?) The stuff in the newspapers they spell with asterisks. Or Mike did in his letters. Leastways, to his son. Can you imagine such a thing?

  “Meanwhile, back at the point … I’d been going crazy is the point. Suddenly, just the sound of his voice – the mention, for Christ’s sake, of his name, and it’d be like someone had opened a faucet. Sorry, a tap. And I … Well, I just couldn’t stand it. Like I said, I had an itch. Mike was an itch, and the effect he was having on my blah-di-blahs, that too was an itch. Ones that needed scratching. Urgently.

  “The itch that was Mike, that would have to be scratched during the weekend. The itch in my blah-di-blahs, though, that had to be dealt with now. Except that the relief that came from dah-di-dahing was … short-lived. I mean, no sooner had I … you know, ‘veni’d’ than … I don’t know, I’d give Mike a call or something, and the whole frigging, soggy process would start over. And with a vengeance. Jeez. I was getting even fed up with it, you know. Walking into shops, wondering whether everyone there could smell me. Sort of waddling, trying to keep my thighs as far as I could from each other.

  “Do you know, so desperate was I for sex, I’m not sure that – looking back on it – when the event finally happened, I even felt him. Not what you’d call ‘felt’. It was there, the event, the sex. And I sighed this giant sigh of relief. The man dying of thirst suddenly given water. This huge whoosh of relief, as I knew he was there. And I ‘veni’d’, like, right off the bat. ‘Premature evacuation,’ I suppose you’d call it. Or premature ‘ovacuation’.

  “You see it in the Olympics sometimes, don’t you? Athletes on their knees – on all fours, rather – panting, exhausted. Spent. – And what they wear, athletes today, they might as well be naked. – That was me. And with an athlete’s grimace – one where it is impossible to tell if they’re in agony or ecstasy. And where the truth is that the athletes are in both, agony and ecstasy, and both are feeding off of each other.

  “And it wasn’t only blah-di-blahly that I ‘veni’d’. I mean, my whole body was in spasm. And then parts of my body, they’d have their own spasms, like their own private mini-‘venis’: my throat constricted and then slackened; my hands started shaking and my breasts twitching; even my eyebrows decided to do some kind of weird St Vitus cha-cha-cha or something.

  “And you know what it was, this whole great juddery, one great enormous blah-di-blah? It was my life-throes.”

  +++

  I’ve got a feeling you didn’t come that first time. And I remember being disappointed by that. Oh, the performance was all very ‘When Harry Met Sally’, but … well, maybe I’m wrong. I didn’t then know you as well as I do now. There was rapture there, certainly, and you’re not given to feigning such things. Then, though, it did feel feigned. Not heavily, not grotesquely. Not struggling through a home-made cake of cement. But maybe that bitter-sweet joy of someone who has won a lot of money on the lottery, but is only one number short of having won the jackpot.

  We did, and this I remember so well, fit so well together. Physically, I mean. Dovetail into each other, like the carpenter’s joint. I don’t think that’s as common as we’re led to believe. And it certainly wasn’t, our first time together, the disaster it so often is.

  I remember you crouched over me, panting, your eyes dancing to Heaven, trying to muster a smile, trying to lollop it in my direction. And I remember smiling back and trying to raise myself to kiss you. And you pushing me back down again. A ‘you-must-be-joking’ sort of a push. A push that protested it didn’t have the energy to breathe, let alone to kiss.

  I remember then being overwhelmed. By this huge sense of peace. This extraordinary sense of peace. It wasn’t a peace of ‘all’s right with the world’. Thank God. I mean, all’s so clearly so very wrong with the world that if that feeling had have come over me, well, I’d have known I had simply lost the few marbles I still had left. No, the peace that came over me was one of ‘you’re alright in this world’. And that’s vastly different proposition.

  How shall I put this?

  There was this psychiatrist, R.D. Laing, something of a cult figure in the ‘60s and ‘70s. Laing’s premise was that anyone deemed sane by an insane society had to be insane, and that anyone deemed insane by it had to be sane. That therefore the only sane members of our society were those that society considered nuts.

  Of course, that’s putting it over-simplistically and, as a theory, Laing’s was over-simplistic. But it had an uncomfortable, even a serrated, edge of truth to it. It gave me some comfort.

  I’d always thought of myself as a square peg in a round hole. And had always thought it was me who was out of step. Laing showed me, or convinced me, it just might be that I was the only one in step. But, even knowing that, I still felt uncomfortable.

  The peace that came to me at that moment was comfort. For the first time in my conscious memory and I suspect for the first time in my life, I was comfortable in my round hole. Christ, that’s a really unfortunate metaphor in these circumstances. Sorry, I most certainly did not intend any sexual puns.

  I didn’t know what had just happened. Oh, it had been great, spectacular, life-changing. But, beyond the generic, I wasn’t
sure quite what had happened. And I was even less sure what was going to happen – beyond an intuition that it was going to be something pretty severe. Perhaps ‘intense’ would be a better word.

  I knew something had happened – some kind of hymen had been severed, some kind of Rubicon crossed; and I knew something was going to happen. But I didn’t know what.

  Beyond this peace. This overwhelming and all-enveloping peace.

  That peace came – it’s taken me some time to realise this, even more time to be able to articulate it (however poorly) – from knowing that what had happened, and was about to happen, was extraordinary and special. And extraordinarily special too, if you like. Its extraordinarily special specialness was caused by the fusion of you with me and of me with you. That fusion could not have happened had you not been you or had I not been me. It was a requirement the fusion had. And that meant that not only was it acceptable for me to be me, it too was a requirement. If part of me being me was being uncomfortable as a square peg, then that too was one of its requirements. And as soon as you recognise it is a requirement, you are no longer uncomfortable with it.

  I wonder whether that makes any sense to you at all. I’m not sure it matters that it does. What is important for you to understand is that, for the first time in my fifty-four years on this planet, I was able to relax.

  I was able to bask. In the warmth, certainly, of your caress. But also in the all-rightness of being me.

  Even aged seventeen, I needed half-an-hour or so between sexual bouts, just to regroup, ‘summon up the blood’. You remember that first time? I’d no sooner left you in shrivelled retreat than I was back on parade, ready for action.

  You know, I hope, what a magnificently attractive woman you are, and that I am hopelessly attracted to you is not something which by now will have escaped your notice. And, certainly, my attraction to you played its part.

  But the alchemy of instant re-attraction was, I’m sure, supplied by that peace, by that feeling – not of validation, that’s a bit different – of it’s-all-right-tobe-uncomfortableness. That’s when the love I have for you soared from desire to something … maybe even uterine. It’s when the love stopped being just ‘Get a load of that’ and started becoming ‘This person is going to change my life. And very much for the better.’

  Wasn’t it the Aztecs who believed that if you ate someone, you’d be possessed of that person’s virtues, their strength and courage? If I’d been an Aztec, or Hannibal Lecter, it would have been then that I would have eaten you.

  Chapter 5

  “Was it good, Mike?”

  “Good?”

  “Oh, thank you. For switching off the ignition.”

  “Il n’y a pas de quoi.”

  “Mike, was it good?”

  “‘It’ the weekend?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Or ‘it’ the sex?”

  “Both, Mike. Were they both good?”

  “No, Trove, not good.”

  “Not good?”

  “No, Trove, not good. ‘Good’ isn’t the right word at all.”

  “Oh!”

  “Trove, they were great.”

  “Only great?”

  “Incredible. Mind-blowing. Fantabulous.”

  “You couldn’t have said that right off the bat?”

  “I was pretty impressed I could say it at all.”

  “It’s going to be difficult, Mike. Saying goodbye.”

  “Don’t say goodbye, then.”

  “I have to go.”

  “You have to go, Trove. You don’t have to say goodbye.”

  “Know something, hon? You talk too much.”

  +++

  She cupped my chin in her hand, brought it to her. We kissed. A practised kiss. Lips finding lips like two long-term ice-dancers gliding together, tongues of fragrance and redolence, dancing their pas-de-deux of savour and relish. We were snuggled in the car park which had somehow become our own. We’d travelled to the hotel in my car. This I’d now parked close to hers.

  +++

  “I wish now …”

  “See, I paused then, Trove, to allow you to finish the sentence.”

  “I don’t want anything between us to finish.”

  “You wish?”

  “You’re off to England, Mike, a week Tuesday.”

  “Yes?”

  “Why are you saying ‘yes’ like that? Like only an idiot would’ve said what I just said.”

  “It’s scarcely hold-the-front-page stuff, Trove.”

  “Oslo, I was thinking.”

  “Of course. I mean, why wouldn’t you be?”

  “I’ve made a commitment, Mike.”

  “Yes.”

  “I wish I hadn’t’ve is all.”

  “I wish you hadn’t too.”

  “But I have.”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s Wednesday, Mike.”

  “Monday, actually. Oh, I see: Wednesday, when you have to go.”

  “You know how long away that is?”

  “Two days?”

  “That’s two days away, Mike. Forty-eight hours. You know how long forty-eight hours is?”

  “Are.”

  “What???”

  “Forty-eight hours isn’t anything. Forty-eight hours are.”

  “Oh, well, that burst that bubble.”

  “It was a joke, honey.”

  “I don’t need to be corrected, Michael. Christ, you know how that makes me feel?”

  “Sorry. I’m so sorry.”

  “Yeah, you should be. No. No, you shouldn’t. No, Mike, I am. Really. Really, hon, you don’t need to apologise. You shouldn’t need to apologise, I should say. It’s my shit, this. Not that it was a good joke, mind. Let’s be clear about that. It’s just – oh Christ – sometimes, Mike, you talk so like Dad, it’s almost like I’m talking to him.”

  “You made out a lot, did you, with your father?”

  +++

  She whipped her head around. Eyes which moments before had been over-ripe cantaloupes, soft and squidgy, became the eyes of a basilisk. Eyes of lava, spitting molten embers. Eyes endowed with such pain they had to cause it. Eyes of venom and hatred.

  +++

  “For a moment there, he was Dad. It was scary.

  “Oh, sure, there’d been reminders, sort of mini-echoes, throughout the whole weekend. Dad and Mike were both tall and with hazel eyes. Both of them liked to laugh and could be cruel without meaning to be. Both of them were bright, though both were a lot less bright than they thought they were. And both of them possessed – no, were possessed by – the most unbelievable intellectual arrogance.

  “It’s the arrogance of a physicist who thinks that because he understands quantum physics quantum physics should be understood by everyone. No, it’s not even that. No, what it is, in both their cases, it’s more that they both think they should understand quantum physics, when all they can do, they can spell the words. But that doesn’t stop them, is what I’m saying, from being extremely intolerant of anyone so ignorant of quantum physics that they can’t spell the words.

  “Did that make sense? At all, I mean? Sorry. Never my strongest suit, English. Mike would doubtless say I had that in common with most of my compatriates. And that’s not it either. Or wasn’t it. But you catch my drift.”

  +++

  She got out of the car. Heavily. With leaden shoulders. She didn’t close the door. I followed her with my eyes. Her eyes flicked to mine. And tripping through the bubble they had of sadness came sugar-plum fairies of new-found joy and just-released rapture.

  Even as I was leaning across the passenger seat, she returned to me. “Didn’t we pay for the whole of tonight?”

  “Al’s waiting.”

  “So’s a huge bed, Mike, with giant pillows.”

  “You don’t mean it.”

  “I want to mean it.”

  “It’s not goodbye.”

  “Just au revoir, huh?”

  “A bientôt, even,”

 
“When’s bientôt, though? When is it?”

  “When we want to make it.”

  “Could we make it tomorrow?”

  “You said …”

  “No, we couldn’t. Will you call me tomorrow?

  she asked.

  “You said …”

  “No, you can’t.”

  “Al …,

  I said. “I know.”

  “You said, Trove, …”

  “I know, for Christ’s sake, I know.”

  “We’ve got phones in England.”

  “Sure.”

  “Emails, fax …”

  “How do you fuck by fax?”

  “Alliteratively.”

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  “There’s even the good old-fashioned shove-it-in-the-pillar-box kind of mail.”

  “And that works how, exactly, Mike? You stick a stamp on your prick, do you? Send it COD? Cock on Delivery?”

  “It was a great weekend, Trove.”

  “I don’t want for it to be over.”

  “You think you’ll forget it?”

  “Does the pope shit in the woods?”

  “Then it’s not over.”

  “Know something, Mike, about platitudes? They’ve got awfully cold feet. They’re not too comfy to snuggle up next to during the winter months.”

  “Al’s waiting, honey.”

  “Isn’t that supposed to be my line?”

  “You weren’t about to say it.”

  “No. I’ve got awfully cold feet, too. I’m not being metaphorical here. My feet, in winter, get ice-blockly cold.”

  “Right.”

  “I’ve also got metaphorical cold-feet, Mike.”

  “Well, I’ll just pop out then, get you some metaphorical bed socks.”

  +++

  Maison d’arrêt de Toulouse-Seysses, 4th April 06

  Dear Dad:

  I’m more sorry than you can imagine that you “can’t do anything. I also, frankly, don’t believe it. But if you’d rather I rotted away here than go the extra mile for me, well then, so be it, I guess. Just please don’t ever tell me, Dad, there’s “nothing you wouldn’t do for me. See, it’s easy to write that you and Mom have left no stone unturned, that you’ve worn yourself into exhaustion on my behalf, but, know what? The proof of the goddamn pudding, Dad, is … in GETTING ME OUT OF HERE. Hear that, you deaf old son-of-a-bitch? Dad, you’ve got to get me out of here. PLEASE. I’m on my knees to you, Dad. Begging you.