He slipped his hand from behind her head to touch her face. His fingers found her mouth and dipped into the little valley alongside the teeth and came up with a warm wetness which he slathered over her lips and chin.
When she was wet he unbuttoned his jeans and fished out his penis. It was tumid, weeping mucous of excitement at the tip. He picked up some on his fingertip and brought it to her tongue, pushing his finger over the sand-paper valley in its center, slipping in and out of her mouth. She took a deep breath and writhed gently on his lap. He explored her mouth with his finger, keeping the probing from below at a slower pace.
She was rising into her breathing again, tensing the muscles of her body and trunk, Henry decided it was now or never. He stroked her cheek with his tip and she turned her face away. But then she turned right back. He repeated this gesture a couple of times. Always she turned away as if feeling a deep responsibility to demonstrate resistance - that, “you’re making me a bad girl” stuff again - but then... she always turned back. “Force me,” she seemed to be saying.
There were two parts of her in this gesture: nice-girls-don’t-do-this, and please-help-me-submit-to-what-I-really-want-you-to-do. There was one way to find out which one of her was present.
He took the bulbous part of him and holding the opposite side of her face in place with his fingers, slipped it between her lips pressing it there with his thumb. She turned away. But this time when she turned back she opened her lips for it, still making little turn-away gestures that faded like small echoes giving in to silence.
Suddenly, she sucked hard on him, drawing him farther and farther in. He was glad to be half-hard and still flexible. Three more sucks and she took it all, down to the root.
He picked up the pace down below, lifting her pelvis with the force of his thrusts. He looked around. Still no one around. Her breathing tightened, squeezing against the strain, then slowed. Her body stiffened and released a few times then lurched forward, jackknifing in staccato jerks, Henry’s penis falling out of her.
The walls of her sex squeezed his fingers in the rhythm of his own coming and brought him close to the brink. He rubbed her folds and she jerked her hands down on top of his, pressing him hard against her. The contractions came again, then everything released.
Without hesitation she took him in again. Henry lost his concentration on Sarah’s body, her part over, and let himself, disembodied, drift somewhere above their two locked bodies, somewhere outside the plane among the stars, hovering in the red plasma of space between Boston and Los Angeles, resisting nothing, afraid of nothing, proud to be given over to the electric squeezing and sucking and... in the incredible irresistible danger of their circumstance released all his worry...
He slumped. She produced a Kleenex from somewhere, wiped her mouth, his tip. Then sat up, abruptly, careful to leave the blanket over his lap.
A few seconds passed.
“I have to freshen up,” she said. And with that, off she went to the bathroom.
Henry had not spoken, unable to rouse from the sleepy haze that lingered. In the moments that followed, the drone of the plane grew louder then fell back as if Henry were on the edge of consciousness, that sensation that comes in the swell of hallucination when fever distorts the mind and the senses respond to some other plan.
He straightened himself, zipped himself, and put the blanket under the seat. As if on cue the flight attendant came through to announce the plane would be landing soon, and a minute later, the lights were on.
What seemed like a long while passed before Sarah came back, looking as if she had found the Macy’s cosmetics counter among the chemical toilet and toy sink. Her lips bloomed with fresh wet vibrant color.
Lipstick! Oh my God! Henry looked at his pants. There was a little smudge-blossom on his fly. For a moment he was tempted to leave it as a mark of a daring encounter. But, overcome by the swell of Sarah’s generosity, he wanted no trophy from her.
“Did you know you were going to do that?” she asked as the plane began its descent and she settled into the seat one seat away from him.
Henry laughed. “No,” he said, which was part truth and part lie. “No idea.” And in the same moment it struck him as interesting how she thought of it as his doing it to her, as if the credit or blame were his alone. She was apart from him now. Ah yes, back to the decorum of a formal life.
The plane landed and they gathered up their things. Outside they stood around with the young man from the art museum who had come to meet her, talking about local artists and the upcoming show they were planning as if that’s all they had thought or cared about, the secret of their in-flight romance as invisible as the... oh, the lipstick?
There was a little bit left, but as they weaved and dodged in conversation Henry discretely covered it, or uncovered it deliberately teasing Sarah. He watched the animation of Sarah’s body in conversation with the young man and confessed to himself a little jealousy, no, more like a sense of passing her, as in an old fashioned square dance: “alamand left with your left hand, back to your partner with a left and right grand... ” no room for selfish disappointment. Sarah had been very good to him. Very good, indeed. He owned part of her now, and she, part of him.
He released the sense of ownership sex will often generate in favor of the generosity that a deeper connection brings and gave himself permission to want her to go to this new man and enjoy the freedom that meant.
They waved goodbye in that official manner that covers up many things. As Henry waited for his change of planes he thought about this business of flying, how the whole idea had been oddly transformed for him. Maybe out of facing his fear had come the exposure he needed to undo this internal tangle that had so inhibited him. Maybe fear is connected in some mysterious way to an equal force in the universe which has the power to neutralize it. He was feeling pretty lucky. Pretty wonderful, he thought, basking in the unpredictable generosity of life.
He knew one thing more. His fear of flying was over.
Emily’s Conundrum
She sat looking at the fortune cookie that had rendered this little perplexity, a riddle perhaps, a perturbation, wondering how it is that mystery creeps into life at such simple moments.
Fortunes, smortunes, she thought. She’d opened many a cookie, mostly to be amused by the inappropriateness of the aphorism. For all she knew this one would fall into that category as well, but for the moment, she just couldn’t let it go.
She had been trying to write a poem, stuck in that place most poets get stuck, breaking the white space of the page. Now this little message. A strip of yellowed paper. It had her blind-alleyed. So she let her thoughts go where they wanted to, which was to Keith - surprise, surprise - the last in a series of monarchs she crowned who had deposed themselves - peasant princes all. Not a mench among them.
Just when she was getting to know a man well enough to think of giving in to him, as in turning the beacon of her life to his face, everything fell apart. Keith, for his part, just dissolved into his freckles and went soft, worse than soft, went without any matter at all. He just ceased to exist.
Now this Chinese fortune, which wasn’t even Chinese, if she could believe the rumor, this little crumple which had set her buzzing without a button to push that says off upon it, or even the courtesy to explain where this buzzing came from.
She looked from her table by the window at the people passing by. What a cliché she thought. What will I see out there if I don’t know what I’m seeing in here? But there was something soothing about the mindless state that looking out a window promoted in her. She enjoyed the safety of that hypnosis a while then turned back to the scrap of paper.
What is it you have to lose in order to find? Asked, but not answered.
She’d turned the fortune over several times, each time to find Chinese calligraphy on the back. She wondered if she had to understand M
andarin to catch on.
She’d been good with Keith. She was sexually attracted to him, and, in her typical tradition, long before she let on she was. She feared the “hit-and-run” tendency she expected from men - for that matter (she had to chuckle in self-reflection), had experienced in herself. She thought of their last evening together and flushed with embarrassment. She looked up, self-consciously. The restaurant was almost empty. Just the help at the far end, cleaning quietly.
Enough of this, she thought. And set herself to figuring out the question. She thought first of money, then the absence of money... that didn’t work. Then of objects. What object had to be lost to be found? Something that came back. A boomerang? That wasn’t it. A homing pigeon? Well, intellectually maybe, but it didn’t please her. Nor did it resonate the metaphorical meaning that fortune cookies were supposed to tie in to. There had to be something more.
The job of the poet, she remembered, was not to provide answers, but to ask the right questions. Well, there must be a great poet at the fortune cookie factory because this one sure got hold of her. But it nagged her now, nagged to the point of frustration. She had to let it go... and warm her hands around the flask of sake on the table before her. She’d tried to avoid bitterness but bitterness was... oh so easy. Optimists make the best cynics, her father had said, himself an optimist, qualified, therefore, to say whatever he wanted to on the subject. The optimist expects good, he said... but endures disappointments so great as to crush the spirit.
A chill started in her hands. It extended now, all the way to her shoulders and the trap of spine between her wing blades, the kind of chill that comes not from cold but from warmth seeking warmth as in the first splash into a hot bath on a cold day... yearning, of a kind, a lusting to be filled.
The little fortune lay curled by its long confinement in the shell of its cookie. She straightened it out in the light. She could look at it and know it was not satisfied.
Her hand moved to the little cup. Summer
was leaving town,
leaving from the small houses
with their small children. August, no close
friend, also departing. On the corner
an old
man squeezed his accordion, where,
without notice, teenage girls passed
on their way to Jamba Juice
for a boost.
She knew the nights, large with stars
would narrow
and lengthen among the tangled oaks
clustered along hillsides. Therefore,
time for sake
with lunch,
clear as communion
the way it deepens as it sits
motionless,
the way its hard clarity runs down your throat
Broccoli sautéed
in a spicy garlic. Slice of orange
on a clean white plate.
At least the sake gave her warmth and enough clarity to ask hard questions:
Why couldn’t she come with Keith?
What was so hard about turning loose?
The spreading fire of sake descended through the middle of her, down to her hips and pelvis dragging the chill with it. It made her gasp and reminded her of the feeling she got when Keith touched her just so. It was about letting go, wasn’t it?
Instinctively, she wanted the hiding place of hypnosis back. Anything not to have to think about this. But something was behind the question and she didn’t have anywhere else to be right now.
So what the hell was it?
She flashed on “Marla’s complaint.” You have to keep it away from the one you want to marry. If you have to give it, give it to someone you don’t give a damn about.
Well, she could see her point. But a lot of good it did Marla. She gave it to Jimmy, all right, saved it from Marty whom she married. But then... she left Marty for Jimmy. So much for that idea.
Saving it to trap Keith in marriage? That wasn’t it. Something else held her back. Was she getting cold? Frigid? Ugh! Okay, okay. So she was a little inhibited. But not cold. She was sensual as anyone. It’s just that her sensuality was more... what was it? ethereal perhaps, transcendent. Ah, well...
She wadded her napkin and tossed it across the table.
Different things are sexy for different people. She could tell she was rationalizing. She hated rationalizing but it felt good and she couldn’t see her way through this maze any other way.
She made a list: sex magazines - not for her. Stories that talked explicitly about making love - yes, but somehow they took away from the beauty of it all. She did not get a charge from photographs of couples making love. She wasn’t one of those women who worshiped the penis. She just wanted it to do its work and stop showing off.
Please!
“Well,” she said. “I’m glad we got that off our chest.”
She loved to look at Keith. The physicality of his body: the sandy hair of his chest and underbelly, the slope of his shoulder. The subtle things were the most sexy. The dimple in the center of his chin. Now that was a big turn-on. Huge. She laughed at the thought she could be seduced by a cloven chin. No, nothing wrong with her sensuality. Just that it was kept in check, by... by something, injury, perhaps. Yes, that was it. Or maybe, yes. Wasn’t it really the fear of injury? If that were so, it came down to a matter of permission.
Jesus, she thought. Fortune cookie philosophy. What next?
Yet the idea of permission fascinated her. Love is not love which alteration finds. “Yes,” she said out loud. Permission for things to be as they are. And isn’t it true about forgiveness, too? Forgiveness does not require apology first. Permission and forgiveness - unconditional.
Keith left. Maybe she knew he would. Even so, wouldn’t it have been better to let herself go? Orgasm best, when it takes the risk?
The argument disappeared from her mind, spreading like water over sand. Time for the denouement. Does all this come together somehow? Look for things in common. It was a willingness to be placed in harm’s way. Counterintuitive, but that was it. Very, very not self-protective. Must one buy safety with risk? No comfort in that. Oh God! No security. The only payoff... love itself.
She sighed. The white hour-glass of sake steamed in its bath. She reached for it, holding it in her hand, letting the almost too hot heat bear down on her and overcome her, shoving aside the little jolts of anxiousness that made her want to retreat. She poured a cup and downed it...
... all this thinking. Time to concentrate on things that feel good. Simple things. Like this heat the sake made inside her. How easily she could go to that place and feel herself turning downward into it, like a cat circling to her bed, spiraling into the glow that pulsed like some newly formed star.
The heat inside was good. She decided to let it go where it wanted to.
As if by permission it spread to her underside, and rested there. She began to throb in that wet... what’s the word? She hated the word mucous, so... fleshy. But there was a beautiful word somewhere... silm. That was it. Silm. She’d read it first in a poem by Robert Hass:
... and what to say of her wetness? The Anglo-Saxons
Had a name for it. They called it silm.
They were navigators. It was also
Their word for the look of moonlight on the sea.
Just thinking about it she could almost feel her own, forming inside her, as if to say the word could call it forth. Silm, silm... silm... silm.
Light touched the table, part loudly, part understated. The particles of luminance showered from the point of incidence like tracers from a sparkler. How easy it is for light. “I wish I were light,” she said without needing to know if she had been heard.
She concentrated on the word silm. The restaurant around her erased itself. First the workers at
the other end, then the fichus plant, the mirrors on the wall, the red ribbons, all the way down to the far edge of her table, the last table, out by the window, out at the edge of nothingness, the table at the far end. She erased the out of doors with its accordion player, erased at last, even her own table with the white cloth, white plate, and the Chinese conundrum. Her eyes dimmed, her head drifted as in the moment before sleep, lips apart. There was nothing about Keith but the idea of Keith.
She imagined her silm, love that word, deep in her pelvis, the water of pleasure held there, pressed back, as if to every wall of every cell, gathering itself. A little dam across, breakwater against the loss of control... how convenient... not to be too early, maybe, it was many small dams, their sizes adequate, competent, holding like small cupped hands what is given to them.
Warmth now, and behind it, a chill that wasn’t a chill, arcing to the articulate mouth, spilling back, on her folds to the deep angulation of her thighs, her undersurface, the floor of her solar plexus.
She rocked in her chair, just perceptibly, as if it were a muted form of what went within, as if by a will which was not her own, motion had spread like particles of sunlight agitating over warm water, a quivering, all the way out to the edge of her skin where she thought it could go no farther, then even to the tips of lenugo hairs, where it blazed and reflected back into her. She tensed and eased, and tensed, until the spillway brimmed - and in that moment she remembered permission, permission, a generosity to give herself over, a giving she could withhold and did withhold another instant, letting it swell on the precipice of irresistible leaping, holding it there just... for... the... squeezing... pleasure of it... then she gave in... completely, and the spillway over-rushed... and she trembled herself outward into the universe.
Time passed. And dissolved into itself.
She tried to open her eyes, but could not. Only when the rumbling settled and she felt in the aftershocks the beautiful word she had rehearsed on her skin, could she blink open the light.
The room had not changed, but for the change she made of it. No one stood around her, no one near but the Chinese fortune, straightened in its place the table.
Secret in the Open Page 14