Still in bed, the sheet now cast away, I knew I had heard those words distinctly uttered by Paul, facing me.
“How did you do that, Paul?” I asked him.
He turned around, walked back to the edge of the bed. “What?” he asked as if orienting himself to his own words.
“You said you tried to be a homosexual.”
He lay back down next to me, head to feet. “I even tried drag.”
I laughed, deliberate laughter, loud laughter.
He winced and I tried to compensate: “Trying to picture you in drag—” It was difficult: the defined muscles, his handsome angular face, his masculine manners, his arrogant stride—in drag? “Jesus, Paul, you must have looked ridiculous.”
It worked. He laughed, too. “I did look awful, like a man in drag! It was in Paris; I went to a party. Genet was there. He was in drag, too, and he looked like the tough convict he had been—in drag. Someone asked if we were lesbian twins.”
I didn’t have to force laughter now; it came easily.
“He is a superb writer.” Even now, he startled me with his abrupt shifts. “The life he lived, the life he describes—masquerading, living at the edge of despair and danger, in prison for years—”
Even now, a tinge of his sarcasm aimed at my own brief incarceration; and he went on:
“—and exhilaration, danger, a courtship with evil, courting evil, that’s living, the life I admire, accepting it all, welcoming it all, a part of it all—”
Courting evil…. “In drag?” I tried clumsily to break a new tension aggravated by his words.
“High drag,” he said, shifting again. “Dress, high heels, stockings, everything, like the queen in your story, Miss—”
“—Destiny.” Miss Destiny, the defiant queen in my story, Miss Destiny, who swore to storm heaven and protest, to confront and judge God. In drag.
Paul’s face shone with sweat. “I wanted to feel entirely like a woman, to feel the goddamned power of a woman, to understand why I was bound to them, needed them—wanted to release myself—”
I was welcoming the promiscuous rambling—it kept me from understanding what I wasn’t sure I wanted to understand, his casual admiration of evil, a word that lingered in my mind unwanted, floating at the top of his rush of words in this room saturated with sweat, which, evaporating, gave to our bare flesh a welcome coolness.
“But it didn’t work, man,” he said. “That night, in drag, I fucked two whores, pulling out of one, entering the other, fucking each, back to front to back—and then I began tearing the drag I had kept on, the delicate things, tearing them strip by strip, peeling them away, the women’s things as if it was those that bound me.” He burst into mean laughter, harsh, rough laughter. “Stripping away those fucken clothes, their clothes, their power, I ordered the sluts to blow me one after the other until I shoved one away, and I kept one to take it all, swallow my cock to my balls, and I pushed her head till my cock was all the way down her fucken throat, and I wanted to feel all sensation gathering there, for me, in me, in my cock, my cock pulsing in her throat, and I forced her head to stay there—deep in her fucken throat, feeling it all, all of it, feeling my cock, man, pulsing, alive, man, my cock, me—until she choked, still I kept her there, shooting spurts of cum into her throat, every drop of my fucken cum in her fucken cunt-mouth.”
He lay back, exhausted, next to me. We lay silent, both of us, as if trapped within the frozen heat.
He stood up, staring down at me. His shorts were soaked with sweat, pasted against his groin. He looked naked, the saturated cloth outlining his aroused cock, pushing at the thin white tissue of the shorts.
I looked away from him, looked down at my own body, the sheet matted under me with sweat, my own cock outlined within my shorts, and straining.
After a time whose length I couldn’t determine, Paul walked out.