THE WAY WE fucked each other had the precision and focus of cruelty.
His face, my breasts, our lips and skin grating together – all the bleeding, all the noise, all the decorations, all the esoteric and aesthetic niceties of seduction became inconsequential when we were making love. Finally, it was the act, the pure act of wrong that we were executing that allowed everything else to exist. As our bodies matrixed into the transgression, our pleasure was informed. The flavor of sex was made better by the adultery.
Our nearly sublime moment was reached when anything was possible, when finally any false morality had dissolved, when reason and compassion and pity were nothing more than weak excuses to keep him from my bed.
Last night I dreamt we were in his house again, her inert body there beside us on the kitchen floor. She looked prone and vulnerable in my dream, exactly the same way she had really been all those years ago. I dreamed that I was fucking her husband, rounding my back over him, bringing my hips to his with a deliberate languor. I was forcing him to keep an almost cautious rhythm, drawing his pleasure up into my own body with excruciating exactness. It was a dissection of pleasure, fucking him that way. It was clinical, and I liked the detached, powerful feeling overwhelming my sensibilities. I was thinking how they were both really helpless to me at this moment, and I knew it was a moment that would pass so I thought to draw it out, to measure each breath. I remember wishing that her eyes were open, and more clearly I recall scrutinizing her drunken, slack face as I pulled my body taut over him, my breasts lifted into the air, my belly flat as I reached behind my ass to hold his balls. I turned my attention to my own body and remember feeling pleased at how powerful it looked at that moment, how strong and able. I felt victorious and this urged my pleasure to a mysterious, darker part of my psyche. I can still almost feel the motion of going down slowly over him, using the hard, round tendons on his shoulders to brace myself, pulling up again and again and then falling all over his cock like an unpredictable tide. I was hoping that she would wake up, thinking our crime really wouldn’t be complete unless she knew about it. If she had, by chance, woken, she would have known the worst of the transgression by watching the way his body was betraying him, by the way his body was betraying her, she would’ve known she was being robbed by the way he was lifting his body, the way his neck pulled tight and his face torsioned into an erotic grimace straining to meet me with every contraction, every pull, and every bend of my sex. She would have known that night that I possessed him in a far deeper way than she had ever conceived of desiring.
In real time, in the past, she lay on the floor next to us, victimized, dead to passion, dead to our world. That last night I took her husband and baptized him when he came between my legs. Our lovemaking that night was an event that shaped many others, an historical act of fucking, and I could feel this. I could feel the power of the temporal, the celestial, the demonic culminating inside the mysterious wet flesh of my body. I could feel his cock leaving definite impressions on the softer part of my internal flesh, and I knew that my sex, my hands, and my lips were marking his body, his life. There are infinitesimal tattoos on the inside of my cunt from him.
When I think of him I often think of tattoos, a criminal’s mark, a street stigmatic’s sign that he is other. When we fucked that last night, we left little red A’s all over each other’s bodies, red A’s that never come off, never really wash away. Certainly, he has faded in my mind. She has nearly disappeared and I may not even recognize her. Her face, her personality was never important to me. But though the red A’s have faded, they exist, just as the three of us continue to exist.
“Nobody is going to die from this,” I told him, when the guilt started to panic him.
There are times now that I find her trying to infiltrate my dreams, as if she has tried to make me feel shame or regret when I am vulnerable, sleeping. Of course, I only took pleasure in remembering the guiltless grace of my transgressions, the perfection of fucking her husband. I refuse any offer of redemption, any false promises of salvation if I admit an even more false sense of guilt. When I wake after these dreams, I think mostly of the electricity that ignited my body when I was taking him. I was so powerful, so omnipotent that I let him believe that it was he who was taking me. It was never that way.
The dreams and memories are never sentimental, but they lack the beauty of the actual event. There was a purity to our crime. There was a clarity that infidelity sometimes affords liars. We were liars, and, being supplicant to all the lies we were constructing, we became intoxicated With the complexity, drunk with the shame and fun of being bad.
When we were making love, there was a bald, rude nakedness that only fed our need to consume the moment, a raw excess of light, a heat, a sun emanating from the reflection of sweat on our arms, on our foreheads. As our breasts were bruising the soft surface, sparks of glaring diamondic light rained down on us.
One night soon after he had tasted me, after he had poured his diabolic, toxic truths into my mouth, into my ears, into my sex, one night after I had held his head between my legs, making him drink more than he should have, he was drunk from my juice.
“You’re crazy drunk from the juice in my pussy,” I said to him.
He was drunk with criminal passions, intoxicated with champagne. He was absolutely smashed with the idea of leaving a life he hated, a life that oppressed him. He was drunk with the possibility of freeing himself, as if the key were located somewhere inside my body. His hands pried into me, searching for an escape, but my body did not relent.
“I don’t have the key,” I said, “but you can look.”
Desperately he looked into my organs. He peered into my eyes, my breasts, looking for a way out.
“Show me where you live. Show me your wife. I want to see this horrible life you are so ready to destroy. Show me the whole fucking picture.” I thought he would deny me the pleasure, but he thought it was a swell idea. My body pulsed with excited meanness. We were going to invade his sanctum, his home, his wife. This, I suppose I was thinking at the time, would validate all our sweating, all our grunting, all our criminally great fucking.
“You’re in me deeper than I thought. You’ve fallen all the way inside,” I said, raising my eyebrows.
Early on in our game, his wife had tried, in a rare display of strength, to frighten me away. Sadly, the weapons she used had no effect on me. I didn’t give a fuck about compassion, or morality, or what she called “the sanctity of marriage.”
“There’s no going back now,” I said without any expression on my face, while I stroked his hair. I was holding his head on my breast.
“He’s my husband!” she screamed at me over the phone one night. I could tell she thought her words were going to change the fact that he was putting his cock deeper and deeper into my life every day.
With every push, the mutability of her world was more remote. She didn’t realize that we could hardly hear her voice over the rain of sweat pelting the sheets of my bed, couldn’t hear her over the orgasms that were washing the wooden floor of my house.
His body was like morphine, and he had become this particular addict’s attraction. The way we came together, the way that gravity hurled our bodies at one another, seemed predetermined.
Without hesitation, I took what I wanted.
Her attempt to wrest his attention, to turn his gaze away from the maze of my flesh was weak-hearted, while the purposefulness, the single-minded focus with which I straddled and attacked his body with the lips of my mouth, the teeth of my sex, the way I held his shoulders between my fingertips, the way I wanted him had a honed quality to it. I felt expert when I was fucking him, I knew the pleasure of a murderer’s discipline when we made love. And some portion of my psyche knew that the existence of his wife allowed for the intensity of our pleasure. He denied this. He wanted to attach the desire, the dizzying draw of one another’s body, to love.
“Don’t be silly, darling. You don’t love me. You’re just going through a mid-life crisis,” I said to him.
He protested louder. He protested too much.
But I knew that the orgasms, the wild flowering orgasms that shattered windows and tore holes in the walls, in my lungs, in my heart, were hinged on his wife’s existence.
His wife flinched and backed pathetically away like a wounded animal, trying to hide her face from the bestial truth of his desire for me, his unnatural attraction to my pussy. When she recognized the lunacy of his desire, she threw herself upon him, begging him in clumsy girlish pleas to stay. He instinctively moved toward me when she showed her weakness, as though the power of my sex could shield and preserve the perfection of our affair from the disease of their mutual weakness.
Our transcendent moment was reached when anything was possible, when finally any false morality had dissolved, when reason and compassion and pity were nothing more than weak excuses to keep him from my bed.
One night we agreed to go see her to declare our victory. He really believed our passion was going to conquer the banality of his middle-class life. He was electric with the knowledge of our fucking and how it had sealed his fate. He was ready.
“I’m ready,” he announced.
“You’re drunk,” I replied.
He had the look of a polite man, a little sorry as he declared he was ready to commit metaphorical suicide. We went there to gloat, to glow all over her loss. To punish her, for she had committed the sin of banality.
When we walked into his house, I shuddered at the sharp edges of his reality. There were so many little objects around the house, millions of papers, books, flowers, photos, millions of little anchors and weights. There was plenty in the rooms of this house to keep him from jumping off. I thought perhaps the terrible weight of a lifetime of knic-nacks would keep him from any really great passion. His world, his home, was so material it was a glaring opposite to our world: a bed, flesh, fingernails, and hair. Our reality was housed in the juices our bodies provided. My pussy was home to him now.
“You really don’t need much more,” I assured him.
When we walked through the front door, I realized he was not strong enough to crawl out from underneath all this earthy, comfortable excess. No matter how warm and inviting my sex was. His existence was informed by the furniture, the paintings on the wall. I was offering him only my body, my breath. For the time being.
I felt the walls move in close around me. I felt the oppression of all his nice things, the tyranny of objects. The life in this house smelled like slow death. A life without tangible passion. I could see his weakness in every beautiful object that decorated his home. It was as though the more frantic his attempt to regain some sense of being, the more things he collected, and the more he vanished. Until he found me. My legs were open, my mouth dirty, my hunger for wrong so great that I simply wanted to eat up his life and spit it out.
“A prelude to much greater wrongs,” I said, seducing him.
“She knows we’re coming. I warned her. I told her.”
“Bastard,” I said, and squeezed his hand, encouragingly.
He whispered as we moved slowly through the treacherous labyrinth, as though, if he raised his voice, he would wake the objects in this house. At last we found his wife, lying on the kitchen floor, wearing what appeared to be a wedding dress.
I put my hand to my mouth when I started to laugh. This tableau, it seemed, was his wife’s last little burst of energy in this hysteric drama. Her desperation had a kind of suburban sentimentality to it that I could appreciate. I kept laughing even as I felt a rare desire bloom, unusual in its strength and form. It grew up from the bottom of my abdomen and motivated my body to act. I desired him more greatly than before. It was a feeling of such great ambition that my laughter grew more full bodied and loud. I wanted to wake up all the lovely objects in his house. Especially his wife. Then my laughter became explosive, because, for a perfect and prolonged moment, I thought she was dead.
He turned to meet the sound that came out of me, and on his face was a horrified, maybe even a disgusted, expression I had never seen before. But I didn’t stop laughing.
“We killed her,” he whispered in shock.
“Don’t be so hopeful, she’s not dead. She’s drunk.” I gestured to the wine bottles on the floor next to her body. “But what about that dress?” I started to laugh again.
I was wiping my eyes. I felt nothing more than a need, a hunger to satisfy my desire in his house.
When I reached toward him, he flinched. His gesture was microscopic, but it was visible.
He moved away from me. He went to her and knelt next to her as she lay there, her mouth open, the dated wedding dress wrinkling up around her waist.
I could see that he was humiliated by the sordid B-movie quality his passionless life had taken, and I was glad he was ashamed since I knew now that he was never going to leave her, or this house, or all the things in it. He looked at me quizzically, almost accusingly, as though he were still wishing that all the answers in the world, all the meaning of the universe lay somewhere deep within my pussy. I could tell by the expression on his face that he was crushed that I was not going to be his kinky Pandora, the one who would unlock his oppressed body.
He sat bent over her, unmoving, and I watched his power wane. Every moment in this house, his heart was shrinking back to its normal middle size, a heart that had grown huge with the lust of a criminal act.
“You only pity her,” I said, accusing him. I lit a cigarette. I could tell that he wanted to tell me not to smoke in the house, but of course he didn’t humiliate himself further.
As I studied him bent over his silly, suburban Ophelia, I realized that my hunger for him would last only as long as this great, absurd moment. Breathing in the importance of my disappointment, the greatness of my aching, I took this last moment. I seized it. I wished then that the brilliance of our lovemaking could have extended beyond my mattress. I was vaguely insulted. I was relieved and I was angry. I wanted to see to it that the memory of our lovemaking would outlast any true recollection of the body. I wanted to make certain that this night would become a seething, palpable memory throughout his life. I wanted him to always be uncertain that he did the right thing by staying with his wife. Even though I knew that he did precisely what he was meant to do. The certainty of this knowledge urged me forward in this drama.
“Fuck me,” I said, walking toward him.
“What?” he said, shocked, not moving from his wife’s side. She was as drunk as a bum on the Bowery.
“Fuck me right now. In front of her. Fuck me,” I whispered, smiling a little, feeling the potency of our tragedy. I didn’t want him to see it in my face, so I unbuttoned the front of my shirt.
I was looking at her wedding dress bunched up around her waist. I focused on a little wine stain that marred the bodice.
Suddenly I felt the kind of control one knows only in rare moments, usually moments of deathly terror or rage. My fingers were moving with a poetic precision, pulling my clothes away from my body. He turned to face me and, in doing so, his own weakness. The accusation was in my body, in my hand reaching to pull his clothes away from his body. My offer of taking him, my promise of fucking him back to life was unbearable, his inability to accept the invitation an admittance of defeat. He had lost his faith.
The strength of his face was fading quickly, the edges of his character falling away. I reached out and put the palms of my hands on his chin, wanting to hold him together, feeling that he might literally fall apart, or perhaps that I might tear him apart. His personality, like hers, was becoming small, a boat on the ocean, expertly swallowed by the sharp edge of the horizon.
His wife’s inert body on the kitchen floor was fast becoming the apogee of my attention, the stained and wrinkled dress the clichéd symbol of our wrong. He desperately tried to move me away from her, to lead me out of the kitchen.
“No. I want to have it here. Now.” I suppose the sound of my voice told him that being near her body was exciting me.
I was standing closer to him now, naked as he was kneeling nearer to her.
“I feel like I should genuflect,” he gasped, looking wildly into my nudity.
“Yes. You really should,” I said, pulling his head toward my pussy.
He put his tongue inside me, and with growing force let his body involve itself once again in our crime. While he kissed me, I wrapped his hair around the tips of my fingers, watching his wife lying there near us. I was ready to come almost instantly, so pulled away from him, teasing him with the warm sex smell emanating from my hair, the odor of promise coming from between my legs. There was a force issuing from every orifice of my body, a destructive, erotic force coming out of my hands and eyes. My nudity shamed him because it was fearless, even though it was clear that this fuck was the big crash and burn.
“Shame on you,” I said quietly. It was the only rebuke I could conceive of for his inability to take what life offered.
A few seconds passed. I wondered if he were considering the price of his infidelity, tallying the months, the years of penance he was going to have to pay his wife for exposing the ugly truth that their marriage was a bore and a failure. She would say he was a liar, but his crime was not a lie. His transgression was the truth. He had acted on real impulses and, like every good puritan, he knew he would have to pay. As I stood there, he knelt in front of me, his face resting on my belly, and I imagined that he was trying to count the purgatorial nights he would have to sleep beside her. I was hoping with a vengeance that he would come to understand the tangible pangs of regret.
Suddenly it was as though a physical roar emitted from his hands, from his eyes, from the entire expanse of his skin and he yanked my body to him hard. He pulled me apart and down on him. In a fleeting moment of courage, he relented to my minor perversity. We fell to the floor, next to his wife, and, as our bodies clashed and sparked, we rolled and tumbled against her inert body. The backs of my thighs brushed her arms, and I could feel the slick, cool satin of her white dress on the warm flesh of my ass. I pushed my body against her dead dress. I was in union with both of them now.
For a last time, his body was an accomplice to my body.
I wanted to fall on her, smell her hair. I wanted to moan and cry into her skin, leaving the sound of my pleasure on her forever.
I bit him on the neck. I held him still with my teeth as I sucked the bite hard, forcing him to focus on the pain of his actions. I had never known such power between my legs, made stranger because I knew it was not an organic lust that has time to grow and flower. It would certainly destruct at the moment following climax, and I felt driven to that finality. Before I abandoned him, I was going to capture his orgasm and keep it in my mouth forever.
I tore at his body, pulled him into me. His wife still lay motionless, her dress rustling with the breath tearing from my lips. As our bodies fused, our encounter seemed more and more anonymous, as though our terrestrial bodies were vanishing, erased with every caress, the flesh pared away, at each inhalation a soldering cell shaved away, making the reality of the other impossible and we were nothing more than genital and breath. I watched to see where we met. With almost clinical detachment I saw his cock disappear into the invisible folds of of my body. I watched his personality, his fear, his life, disappear into the folds of my own life. I was swallowing his history for a moment so he could enjoy me once more.
He opened his eyes and looked at me very hard, fucking me slowly but more forcefully with every thrust. He was digging into me as though seeking reassurance that with every graceful push of his hips, with every perfected contraction of his ass, of the arch and bend of his lovely belly, that he was pleasantly careening, falling recklessly toward momentary nothingness. Every time his body demanded that mine meet his, I complied and mirrored the demand. We were accomplices. I felt every indelible mark my mouth, my teeth, my vagina made on his body. I was fascinated with the translucent, vulnerable flesh of our genitals, the clear white of our pelvises, the delicate skin like two razors coming together. Our bodies were slicing. He was making a deep, close-eyed call into my neck, a sound far beyond the capacity of his temporal body, leaving rosy echoes on my skin.
I was coaxing him, holding him together with my thighs. I could feel my body filling more and more with him, with his smell, his sounds, his sex. I continued to watch his wife, still unconscious. In a sudden impulse, I reached over and touched her.
This was a new sensation of transgression. I touched her skin, her cheek. I put my hand in her hair. He opened his eyes and saw that I was touching her, tracing her lips with the tip of my finger.
“Don’t do that . . .,” he said helplessly, knowing that I would do what I pleased, to him and his wife tonight.
I dragged my finger down her chin and over the soft, sexy grotto of her neck. She didn’t respond at all. I was excited, filled with limitless possibilities.
I was still holding him inside me, feeling the pulse of him drive toward a conclusion. I rolled over so that he could take me from behind, so that I could concentrate on both husband and wife. He was mortified as I let my breasts touch her dress, covering the stain on her bodice.
“Fuck me. He’s fucking me,” I whispered into to his wife’s face.
I was close enough to smell her boozy breath. Her face was quite pretty. He pulled at me, trying to draw my body away from hers. I don’t know whom he was trying to protect at that moment, but I don’t imagine it was me. I fell forward and put my lips over her mouth. I kissed her slowly, letting my tongue sip her lips, feeling the creases of her soft, dead mouth, feeling the impressions of her husband’s cock. He was gasping, but I could hardly hear it, my head muffled and drowning in her hair. I couldn’t take my mouth from hers, so great was the pleasure. The sensuality of her warm, unresponsive tongue was radical in sensation and sensibility. He was holding my flesh hard, reaching for my breasts, and I could feel his warm breath in my hair. I took her hand and brought it to my nipple, a grotesque elocution of desire. I imagined she was dead. The more fiercely he fucked me, the more he pushed the air out of my lips and into hers. He was fucking me into his wife. He had one hand on my clit, my clit that had turned into a big, red ruby between his fingers. His other hand had secreted itself under the white lace of her dress. He pushed away the fabric and took her nipple between his fingers, caressing it, mirroring the way he was touching me. I was swelling with a great scream.
By equal increments we moved closer and closer to finishing the deal. I tore my mouth from hers before I was going to come, not wanting to give her that. I pulled his hand from her breast and guided it to my hips. In one last effort, he pulled me into him, and I pushed against her breasts, using her, bracing myself against her for our orgasm.
I took him, I sucked him through her mouth, and when I ate his breath it was regenerated back out of my mouth in a terrible victorious yell. It was a scream that should have awakened her, but it didn’t.
I remember that her dress smelled like mothballs.