IT AROUSED ME TO SEE HER EAT. THE SLIGHT LOWERING OF her eyelids and full dark lashes as she opened her mouth. The movements, as she quietly chewed, of her nose, philtrum groove, and the perfect angel’s cleft of her upper lip. The soft lissome undulations of her flawless smooth throat as she swallowed. It was more seductive than any slow forbidden dance.
“I love this,” she said. “What’s in it?”
“A little butter, a little olive oil. A lot of onions, a lot of garlic. Porcini mushrooms, cremini mushrooms. Ground pork, ground beef. A little stock.”
“What kind of stock?”
“Pork on the bone, beef on the bone, veal on the bone, chicken on the bone. Onion, leek, garlic. Celery, carrot, tomato. Some parsley, a few black peppercorns, a few white peppercorns, a little sea salt, a bay leaf, a clove, water, an eggshell.”
“Why an eggshell?”
“To clarify it.”
I paused, then went back and picked up where she had first cut me off when I was trying to finish telling her what she wanted to know, which was what was in the sauce.
“A little tomato paste. Basil, parsley, oregano, thyme, pepper. A little salt. That wine you’re drinking. San Marzano tomatoes. Sweet sausage, hot sausage. A bay leaf.”
“It’s really fucking great.”
“Thanks,” I said. I was glad she liked it. I didn’t go by what she said, I went by how she ate. And I was glad she didn’t say it was awesome. “It’s missing one thing,” I said.
The look in her face, and my undercurrent of arousal, allowed my imagination to sense a vague thrilling expectation of the unknown. But I saw a trace of unease in her look, and I wanted her to be rid of it. So I told her.
“Parmigian,” I said. “I couldn’t find any good parmigian cheese. It was all too young.”
The trace of unease subsided, but it was not gone.
“Am I too young?” she said. Now she herself tried to hide that telltale trace behind a smile of sorts.
“Too young for what?”
“For what you want.”
“And what do you think I want?”
“I don’t know. Do you want to fuck me? Do you want to show me off? I really don’t know.”
“I don’t want to fuck you. Not in the conventional sense. And no, I don’t want to show you off.” I looked into her eyes. I felt it strange that we were saying these things. We had only been together a single night before this. Then again it had been a night not quite like any other. “I want what we had the other night,” I said.
“I’m sore,” she said. It seemed, as soon as she said this, that she had not meant to say it, that it had just rushed out of her in a quick flight of breath.
I didn’t say anything. It caught me off guard to hear a woman, or a girl or whatever it was that I should see her as, talk about her left thigh as if she might be talking about her breasts.
“You’re not drinking,” she said.
“No, I’m not drinking,” I said, perhaps a bit defensively.
“You didn’t drink the other night either.”
“I’m not drinking these days,” I said with a shrug, careful to give these words an air of casual insignificance. I watched her take a sip of wine. “I feel too good lately,” I said. “I want to write a new book. I don’t drink when I write. I can’t.” I was lying. I didn’t want to write a new book. Maybe I didn’t want her to know that I was trying to quit drinking forever, maybe because most people who drink don’t like to be around people who don’t drink, people who have quit drinking, especially people who go to meetings. And I didn’t want to lose her. I had just found her, and I didn’t want to lose her.
“I should probably cut down too,” she said. “I drink too much.”
Again I was caught off guard, to hear her, all of nineteen, talk as if she were hearing harps and harpies. I poured more wine into her glass.
“Oh, you’re fine,” I told her. “Here, drink up.” I wanted her to relax around me. I wanted her to open herself to me. I wanted what I wanted to be what she wanted. It was good for her to drink the way she did. This wine would help her give me what I wanted. “Come on. You’re fine,” I told her.
“Do your parents drink?” she asked.
“My parents don’t do much of anything anymore. They’re dead. They’ve been like that for a long time.” I smiled. “My father was a heavy drinker. My mother didn’t drink much. She couldn’t handle it.”
I heard my own words. It was curious how I spoke of whatever it was, physical or spiritual or both, that had stood in the way of my mother becoming a drunk like my father; how I spoke as if it were a failing, a shortcoming, a disability. The words came readily, easily: couldn’t handle it. How much more fittingly would they describe those who succumbed. It was drunks like me who couldn’t handle it.
“My mom drinks a lot,” she said.
I began to wash the dishes. She followed me into the kitchen.
“How old is your mother?”
“Forty-seven. No. Forty-eight.”
At least her mother wasn’t young enough to be my daughter.
“Let me do that,” she said.
“You’re the guest,” I said. “What’s the good of being a guest if you have to wash dishes? Thanks, babe, but no.”
I thought of her legs. I thought of her ponytail in my fist. I thought of the taste of her. I thought of her tongue on that vein that twitched and throbbed. I thought of her stringent warmth entering my mouth, trickling down my throat. I thought of what ran in the veins of gods and goddesses.
“But sweeter to live for ever; sweeter to live ever youthful like the Gods, who have ichor in their veins; ichor which gives life and youth and joy…”
I shut off the faucet and turned around. She was reading some lines of poetry that were held by a magnet to the side of my refrigerator. I knew that she would ask me about them. I embraced her from behind, put one hand over her mouth and the other on her belly. I pressed her to me. Her buttocks felt good against me. I kissed the downy little hairs and skin on the back of her neck and slid my hand down the front of her pants, feeling her silky panties and, through them, the tussock beneath. I worked my hand farther, and she squeezed it with her thighs. I could feel hot breath from her nostrils on my fingers. She began to nibble and lick at them with darts of her tongue. I unbuttoned and unzipped her pants, moved my hand into her panties, then into her. I peered over her shoulder down the front of her sweater to the hidden flesh and shadow of her breasts in white lace, and farther, to the movement of my hand in her open pants.
She lay naked in my bed, her lower lip between her teeth, her legs spread, her eyes probing mine. Her labia were swollen and wet, rosy pink and glistening. I slipped the head of my cock, no more, into her and dallied a bit. She let loose her lip and breathed from deep within. I dimmed the light, grasped her hips, laid my head between her legs and stared at her hand on herself in the obscuring dark. I ran my fingers, then my tongue along the inside of her upper right thigh, which was unmarked, very close to the scent of her and the muffled accelerating sound of her hand. I opened my mouth, and I sank my teeth and tore. She exhaled with violence, like an ecstasy of storm wind through trees.
I felt a sudden thick rushing gush of blood that filled my mouth and would not be stopped. Even as I closed my hand over it, the blood rushed through my fingers. We scrambled to our feet in alarm. There was blood everywhere. And still it gushed.
I wrapped a towel around her thigh, tied the belt from my robe tightly above it. Nothing. The blood flooded and spurted wildly from her. She was pale unto fainting.
Saint Vincent’s had been shut. I wouldn’t bring a dog to New York Downtown. I called Lenox Hill, told them to send an ambulance. No cab would take us the way she was bleeding.
“What did you do to her?” the doctor asked me in a tone that accused.
“I bit her too hard,” I said matter-of-factly. I did not look away from him. “She likes to be bitten. But I bit her too hard.”
“You severed her femoral artery,” he said. “You could have killed her.” The doctor shook his head slowly.
They wanted to keep her there awhile after stitching her up. She needed more blood. I went out for a smoke, then went back in to be with her. She looked away from the blood going into her through the catheter in her arm. For a few moments she looked away from me. I stood there.
“They asked me if I want to press charges,” she said.
I said nothing. I knew that if she were thinking of pressing charges, she wouldn’t have told me this. Not the way she did, anyway. I put my hand on her arm and kissed her forehead.
She later told me that they also asked her if she wanted counseling. She told me that she had thought about it. She told me that she was still thinking about it.
Her color returned. She began to smile again, to laugh again. I enjoyed buying good wine for her. I wondered if, pouring it unseen and telling her nothing about it, she would find the bottle of Cheval Blanc I had hidden away for her to be special in any way. I wondered what might have happened if I had killed her.
I thought often of that terrible night in the days and weeks that followed. When I did, a shiver went down my spine and my eyes sometimes closed. That first reinvigorating billow of blood that had filled my mouth and overrun my chin and chest was like nothing I had ever known or imagined. The dangerous rush of blood from her artery had been for me a rush of life. After the events of that night and its aftermath had passed, I felt physically stronger than I had felt in years, and I enjoyed a sense of calm awareness that was utterly new to me.
On one of my bedroom walls, in a shadow-box frame, there hangs a Wolford pantyhose package featuring one of a series of photographs taken for Wolford by Helmut Newton. These photographs, which Helmut felt to be among his best work, captured some of the most erotic images I have ever seen. The most striking of these, to me, was the black-and-white picture used on Wolford’s control-top Synergy packages. It was one of these rare, discontinued Synergy packages that Helmut inscribed to me a few years before his death, using a bold black Sharpie on the package’s unopened cellophane, writing with a vertical flourish over the thigh of the central image beneath it.
It hangs above and to the left of a heavy mirror into which I rarely looked. One day, lingering before her reflection in that mirror, Melissa pointed to the shadow-box frame without turning her eyes to it.
“Would you like to see me in those?” she said. Her eyes looked to mine.
“Not those,” I said. “But something like them. Yeah.” I heard the pace of my words slow and turn soft and subdued. “I should like that very much,” I said. “Very, very much. I really should.”
“They would cover up the scar.”
“That’s not why. I want to see you in them because they’re the only thing I can imagine that could make you even sexier than you already are.”
And so I bought her some ultra-sheer Wolford pantyhose—the black Synergy, and others with improbably named shades: nearly black, anthracite, oyster, ecru—and a pair of Jimmy Choo black glossy snakeskin, Chantilly lace, and suede shoes with three-and-a-third-inch stiletto heels. Four packages of pantyhose cost over two hundred, and the shoes were almost nine hundred. It would have been worth it even for one night, even for one hour.
The sounds of her movements alone—the scroop of nylon as she crossed and uncrossed her legs, the click of stiletto heels and the sinister hushed squeak of welts and uppers—set my heart pounding. It was so innocently demure and so maddeningly lascivious at once. I did not speak, but only watched her and felt the effect of her symphony like a rising, slow-swelling crescendo within me. On this night I wanted to fuck her. I wanted to fuck every part of her, and I wanted to fuck everything she wore. I wanted to fuck the sound of her, the scent of her. I wanted to fuck her very soul, her very existence, her every breath. She was mine, and I was blest, and no god had created more than we had in this moment. Together with grasping wrenching hands and nails we tore open the crotch of those fancy overpriced pantyhose as the bed shook and creaked beneath us.
“Did you ever think of your mother licking your cunt?” I asked her. The words came deep on heavy breath.
“Yes,” she said. “Would you like to see that?”
It was then that I realized she would say yes to anything that I asked.
“Yes,” I said. “Tell me what it would be like.”
Then my seed exploded from me like rain, and she moaned as if in grieving disappointment, or as if taking a blow to the gut. She said no more but only held me close and soon was asleep. There was no biting that night, though before morning I dreamt that I drank from her while she slept. I woke with a start, for in this dream her silent, tranquil sleep was revealed to be death.
It was good to see her stir beside me, stretching her arms in the early dim light, her eyes still closed. I got out of bed to make coffee. A few minutes later, as the water was starting to boil, she came into the kitchen with a sleepy smile and sat at the little table by the window. She looked out over the gabled roof of the old Mercantile building across the way. There were wisps of pink in a blue sky that grew heavy with gray. I brought her coffee to the little table and set it down before her.
“Maybe here,” she said, still looking out the window, as if she were talking to the gathering gray clouds. She placed her fingers to where the back of her thigh and her buttock rested on the chair. “Maybe here. Next time. Maybe you could bite me here.”
She took a sip of coffee. An extravagant wind whistled through a narrow breach in the window. A beautiful elemental sound.
“I don’t think there’s any blood to be had there in that sweet meat,” I said, then slowly smiled. The coffee was good and hot. I leaned against the black granite countertop of the island in the center of the kitchen, facing the little table where she sat, so that we both looked out on the same sky, the same pink wisps and blue, all but gone now, and the gray clouds that grew bigger and began to roll, fuller and darker, in the wind.
“It’s the blood, not the biting?” she said, and her voice seemed as lost in that sky as she was.
“Yes,” I said. “It’s the blood.”
It seemed that she was waiting not for me but for the lowering clouds and umbrous sky to explain my words. She drank her coffee. There was another whistling through the window, and a rattling of the pane; and then distant thunder.
She asked about the lines of poetry on the refrigerator, and I told her.
“From Charles Olson’s ‘Maximus, from Dogtown’—‘We drink / or break open / our veins solely / to know. A drunkard / showing himself in public / is punished / by death’—and there’s more, but those are the lines that mean something to me.”
“And what do they mean to you?”
“I can’t put it into words. It’s hard to dissect or explain beauty or power.” I gestured to the sky through the window. “Maybe if you can dissect or explain it, then it’s not beauty or power. Maybe true beauty and true power defy reason and intellect and explanation by their very nature. They hit below the belt of those things. I don’t know. To me they’re like a light in the sky of a faraway star that died a thousand years ago. The light of Gnosticism. ‘Solely / to know.’ The search for freedom through wisdom beyond learning. But the Leviticus of fear and morality cannot allow such a thing. As far as the poetry of it goes, you can see Olson’s brilliance. Seven lines, and the central line, the fourth line, is shared by the Gnostic infinitive—‘to know,’ followed by a full stop—and the opening words of a killing law set against all that is inherent in that infinitive, the freedom and wisdom, no matter how high or how low, that fears, laws, and moralities must destroy. But that’s not why I like it, not really. The bedrock of the thing—the rhythm, the meter—is majestic. It could bust a bronze Homeric pickaxe. But it goes so much beyond that. Like I said, I can’t say because I just don’t know. It’s like that whistling wind, that thunder a few minutes ago. I can feel it but I can’t explain why and what it makes me feel what I feel.”
“Damn, you can talk.”
“Yeah, I know.” I smiled. “Without saying much of anything that makes sense.”
“That’s not what I meant. You talk beyond sense. You leave it in the dust. I like that.”
“Maybe that’s where it belongs, in the dust.”
Was this her way of saying she understood about the blood? Her way of telling me I didn’t have to make sense of it for her? Or was it just idle talk over coffee, to be forgotten when the cups were rinsed? I didn’t know, I didn’t care.
“I’ve got a paper due next week,” she said. “I better go and get to work on it. Can I borrow that book you have in there, Whom Gods Destroy, I think it’s called? There’s some stuff in there I want to paraphrase.”
“Don’t paraphrase. Steal,” I said.
Soon after she left I experienced a ravenous appetite. This was somewhat out of the ordinary, as my usual coffee and cigarettes left me with little desire to eat on most mornings, and breakfast for me was either desultory and meager or more often completely bypassed. But on this morning I feasted on a thick broiled pork chop, pan-fried potatoes with sage, thick smoked bacon, three eggs sunny-side up, and buttered toast to mop up the yolks, with two glasses of buttermilk and another steaming cup of coffee. And as I wolfed it all down, my mind dwelt on sausage, banana pancakes drenched in butter and real maple syrup, and a bowl of blood oranges, peaches, raspberries, and strawberries.
It was as if the sallow hollows and wormy protruding veins in weak sagging skin were demanding sustenance for what seemed like a regeneration of flesh and strength, a reversal of long, slow wasting away, a feeling of coming renewal of flesh and strength, a filling of the hollows and the sagging where muscle once had covered sturdy bone gone brittle. Even as my morning feast settled warm and filling within me and I lit another cigarette and drew deep satisfaction from it, I thought of the big, thick rib eye steak, sautéed onions, mashed potatoes, and sautéed greens and garlic that I would eat that night, the warm apple pie that would follow it, and the pancakes, sausage, fruit and berries drizzled with hundred-year-old balsamic vinegar that I would wash down with thick creamy milk and hot coffee tomorrow.
As startling as my appetite was, so was the heightened pleasure with which I indulged it. There was nothing of gluttony to my eating, nothing of idle displaced hunger apart from the good, healthy hunger of belly and body.
Substance and strength were in fact returning to me. Not only could I feel it, I could see it. My flesh, which had withered with the years, began to return to fullness. The atrophied musculature in my limbs subtly thickened to a former solidity that flexed beneath my skin and moved and performed tasks with greater ease and power. And even my skin itself, so loose and sickly for so long, seemed to tighten and glow with a newfound nourishment. When I lay very still I could feel a faint, pleasant tingling inside me, like the cells of my body blithely stirring after a long deathlike sleep.
For most of my life the power that hung and hardened beneath my abdomen had been the sovereign of force and might at the center of my being. I mourned, hurkled, and entered my own shadow with the dwindling of that power, as it became little more than a weightless invalidity, a specter of what once had been; something in extremis that on occasion throbbed and twitched and weakly spat, but had for the most part been drained of force, might, and thews.
Now intimations of replenished life could be felt there, in that fallen temple, as well. Nerve endings pullulated anew. Brutal sinew thickened.
My balance was improving. I could get into my socks, shorts, pants standing up without reaching out for walls, doorjambs, the edges of tabletops.
I thought at first that these changes might possibly be attributed to my having quit drinking and the long-lasting effects of the alcohol beginning to leave my system. But this was a cleansing process that took months and did little or nothing to fix what permanent damage had been done. It brought remission, not metamorphosis. And it was nothing less than a metamorphosis that I seemed to be undergoing.
I felt whole. For a while I reveled in feeling as I had in my prime, when I rode the bull of this life into the crashing sea and wild woods of whatever might be. Then I came to realize that this was no lost feeling wondrously returned. For I had never known such a feeling before. Never.
If it was true that I was eating a lot, it was also true that I was eating well. More than well. One night I got hold of one of the last white truffles of the season, a beautiful firm fawny-brown nugget from a parcel of them flown in that day to my friend Silvano’s restaurant on Sixth Avenue, the soil from the oak roots of Alba still clinging to them. The next morning I fried some thick, smoky duck bacon over low heat, dropped six quail eggs into the fat for less than a minute, removed them to a plate, covered them with truffle shavings, and ate them with the bacon, double-smoked Irish salmon with chopped red onion, Pantelleria capers, lemon, and dill, some good warm rosemary sourdough bread and butter, and a bowl of yellow, orange, pink, and red raspberries over which I spooned fresh single-dairy heavy cream whipped with a bit of wildflower honey from Casteggio. The Lapsang souchong tea I drank with it was good, black, strong, and hot. Its faint smoky aftertaste of kerosene mingled perfectly with the scent of truffle that perfumed the kitchen.
As I ate at the little table by the window, I looked down across the street at those who scurried to their daily servitude, with their Styrofoam cups of bitter watery coffee, their dupe’s containers of treacly Starbucks swill, their industrially dyed and flavored sugar-water “energy drinks,” their assembly line donuts, their stale rubbery bagels, their tasteless doughy croissants.
I washed the dishes, took a Valium, poured a glass of cold goat milk, lit a cigarette, and relaxed. The day was mine to do what I would, or to do nothing at all.
It was a good feeling, an exhilarating feeling. I had long grown to despise this fallen, wearisome world. Now I sensed it held unseen timeless chambers yet to be explored.
Chambers of light. Chambers of dead souls awaiting release. Chambers of passage to what lay beyond imagining. Chambers of what the gods kept hidden. Chambers of wisdom proscribed. Chambers of experience and pleasure untasted for eternity. Chambers of stilled ageless magic breezes waiting to stir. Chambers to be unbolted by hieratic spell, or by a serendipitous movement of the hand—the swatting away of an illusory fly, perhaps, or the waving away of the world itself—that constituted unawares a mudra of primordial power, or by desire, or by the merest unconscious modulation of breath. And I became aware of the singular creeping suspicion that these unseeable but real chambers, which seemed to be secreted so far away, were in fact within me.
I looked down at the scurrying submissives, the divested. Some of them jostled for taxis. At this time of day, it took a lot longer to get anywhere by taxi than by subway. I figured they were too lazy to walk the few blocks to the subway station. They were fool enough to jog along the West Side Highway or on stationary treadmills, presenting a droll spectacle either way, panting toward their one true destination, which was nowhere. But they sat in taxis in traffic rather than walk, rather even than walk to the subway. Did they avoid the subway from fear of crime? Or from a fear of black people, even though they would never admit to it, even though the women they poorly paid to take care of their homes and chores and children, whom they themselves saw no more of than the designer dogs they paid others to walk for them, were invariably black? I think, in many cases, this was so. They were a funny lot, these white slaves of ignoble careers of lucrative indolence. To say that they were deserving of death would be to demean death. It would be without meaning as well, for they were in a way already dead. The jogging dead. Carbohydrate-conscious cadavers with frozen smiles of chilling insensate fake vibrancy on their dull scrubbed pampered faces. A slave who believes himself free conceives of no escape, for he conceives of no freedom beyond that which his station in life allows him. A slave who espouses the freedoms of slavery is a right good slave indeed.
If only they labored nobly, in fields or factories or mills, rather than abetting the masters of finance, whose only products were theft, usury, and lies, or masters of technology, whose only products were cheap and shoddily cobbled toys of degeneration. These slaves made nothing, except perhaps devalued money for themselves, and far more of it for those whom they served. For nothing was any longer made in this country. What did the financial sector produce that could be seen, touched, held, or put to use? Even the handheld devices made on the cheap far from any American workplace were only trifling toys, little more than electric rattles for the overgrown slave-babies in the vast playpen scrouge of their yowling, gurgling nervosity.
Servilia nervosa. They want children, they want dogs. But they seem to want to have little to do with either of these hideous yapping, shitting things, which they seem to regard as accoutrements of what they call their lifestyle—a ludicrous word invented quite fittingly by a psychotherapist.
When they buy inferior overpriced meat, they ask the butcher how to cook it.
On a recent day I had stood at a meat counter behind a woman who, while chattering into a cell phone, asked the butcher if the ground beef came from grass-fed cows. She believed that grass-fed beef was somehow preferable to grain-fed beef, which in fact is superior to it. But the notion of grass-fed beef was enjoying a cachet among au courant imbeciles. She did not ask if the ground beef was from a single cow rather than a mélange of scraps from many cows, which not only compromises the taste and freshness but exponentially increases the risk of taint. Worst of all were the uniform patties of ground beef, which were sliced from long roll-like loaves fashioned from cheap sources by industrial-grade suppliers. It was these patties that she was looking at and asking about, haughtily commenting that she wanted to make steak tartare. But the main event was when she turned around. She was about fifty, in leather pants, with desiccated hair dyed raven black, and a frightfully fallen facelift that could barely have been remedied by a linoleum cutter, a staple gun, a pound of putty, and a trowel. This had not prevented her from applying mascara, rouge, and lipstick in thick, bold, garish strokes, as if working from a palette with expressionistic strokes of a wide-bristled brush. I wondered who would be fated to share her grass-fed dog food tartare with her that evening.
The slaves and indentured laborers who made this country had their elderberry wine, their honeysuckle wine, their sorghum grain alcohol, their purloined whiskey when they could get it. The slaves of today, who raze what little is left with an empty greed that brings forth nothing, have what doctors with straight faces refer to as lifestyle drugs.
White Betty had a baby, bam-de-lam; white Betty had a baby, bam-de-lam. Damn thing gone crazy, bam-de-lam; damn thing gone crazy, bam-de-lam. Whoa, white Betty, bam-de-lam; oh, white Betty, bam-de-lam…
Baby’s first lifestyle drug. Baby’s first handheld device. Baby’s first breakdown. Baby’s first organic grass-fed beef. Baby’s first step to slavery. Baby’s first intimation of something like death.
If you want to make lobster fra diavolo as it should be made, you must forget the nonsense of sending the lobster to what you have been told is a painless sleep unto death in a pot of boiling water. You must hack the raw lobster to pieces in its shell. There is a merciful way to go about this, and that is by first severing the thorax from the tail of the living lobster. If you want to witness something disarmingly bizarre, lay the lobster on its back on a cutting board and bring down your cleaver hard and fast to separate the upper body from the whole of the tail. Then move the two halves so that there is a good inch between them. Touch one of the detached halves. The other half will twitch and stir.
This is how those slaves scurried and jerked, implausibly nervose, in their living death. From the vantage of my window, from a distance, I drew pleasure in a way from observing them. I detested their presence in the neighborhood, but their nature, and the cruel comedy of their existence, seemed a just punishment. When I was among them I drew no such pleasure. The lobster was undeserving of its fate. They were not. And the disturbing movement of the pieces of them was too loud, overbearing, invasive, and insufferable to allow either the mean entertainment or the malicious satisfaction that distance afforded.
Fuck them. Their lives, their death-in-life, their soulless devotion to mindless ulterior greed, the lowest of monotheisms, were the cast lots of their own ruin. Unlike them, I was free. If I could not cherish their inevitable demise, I could escape. I was resistant to the idea of fleeing from invaders. But I was not resistant to the idea of fleeing from pestilence. This city, once so full of life, was now little more than a necropolis. I could get away from this putrid stinking shit hole of Judeo-Christian perfidy. I could get a nice little stone house somewhere, in the countryside near some small town. An acre or two would insure peace, quiet, privacy, domain.
But these thoughts were unfinished. There was the matter of my desires, the matter of my continuance in the new world, the new life, that was just now opening to me. There was the matter of willing young flesh and warm blood, so plentiful in this city of night. Then again, maybe willingness was not of the essence. Maybe willingness was an unnecessary nicety. I shook away this thought. As I drank the last of my milk, my mind wandered through an entablature of images of bucolic solitary quiescence. Maybe someday, I thought. Yes, someday, somehow. Little more than a month ago I had felt that death was near. Now I could envision smiling at the late afternoon sun of my eightieth year and more.
Melissa returned the borrowed book that evening and placed it on the shelf where she had found it. As she did so, my eyes and hands savored the curve of the small of her back and her flanks.
I had a girl that other men—younger men and older fools too—would dedicate the sum of lies, sacrifice, and shifting purchase to have and to hold, to be with and to woo, to follow to where their dreams might come true. I too wanted to have and to hold her. And I did. But my dreams were not of the garden path variety. Since that night in the bar to this night, we had come to breathe in unison; and that breath gently blew away the years between us like so many feathery pappus harls from the seed head of a dandelion fondled by a sigh of soft summer air.
I more than liked her, more than luxuriated in her. I felt at times that I was falling in love with her. Was this a dangerous state of affairs? After so long in cold darkness of heart and soul, I had come once again to believe in love and happiness. Indeed, I now was beginning to feel their goodness banishing the cold and the dark with warmth and light. And the transformation from which the restoration of mind, body, and being grew, the miracle born of deathward desperation, was a rare and marvelous flowering. But it was a flowering not of the sun but of the moon. It was a flowering in the deep foreboding woods of night. A flowering not by spring rain but by the blood of those who, rambling lost in the springtime of their lives, chanced upon it and paused to wonder.
Melissa had paused and not turned away. She was one with the flowering. Her nectar and its nectar were one, and I alone drank of it, the nectar of new and full life. That she was still a child, sending into the air as a child might, playfully, the dandelion fluff of the years that imposed, did not trouble me. She was more mature in her ways, brighter and more intelligent, than many women twice her age. Her beauty was far from childlike. I could easily imagine living happily ever after with her. I had the means to provide for her, to lavish on her.
What troubled me, what quenched my moments of daydreaming, was the simple fact that there was not much blood in a human body. The three or so pints she had lost that horrible night when her artery opened had been very nearly enough to do her in. My flourishing would be her wasting away. The transfusions she had already received were bad enough. There was no knowing where that blood had come from. It could have come from that old bitch asking about grass-fed beef. I needed young blood, fresh and full of life. I wanted it to be Melissa’s. But if it could not be—and it could not be, not without draining her, not without turning her into a ghastly anemic wretch, even if she were to allow it—then, to spare her, to save me, I would have to hunt. I would have to hunt as I had done not so long ago, before I even knew what I was hunting for.
I was living happily ever after right now, in this infinite moment, this present breath that was the sum of life’s promise, the only ever after we really had. As Melissa stood atop the little library stepladder, stretching to replace the borrowed book, the curve of the small of her back that I savored was level with my eyes, and as she nestled the book into its place on the shelf, the waistband of her sweater rose from her low-cut jeans to reveal the dimples at the upper cleft of her buttocks. I put my mouth to those dimples, stroking her haunches and flanks as she lingered on the stepladder, her hands on the bookshelf edge, steadying herself as she flexed to enhance the curvature of her lower spine and swayed her pelvis ever so slightly, ever so slowly. Lowering one hand from the shelf, she pulled her sweater higher from the front, baring the scalloped satiny black back-strap of her bra. I was a sucker for the loose-librarian look. If only she wore glasses, I thought as I stepped onto the ladder behind her and undid the fastenings of her brassiere with my teeth. The ponytail more than made up for the lack of eyeglasses. I kissed the pink crenulations left behind by the loosened cincture of the bra.
Just as that lacy harness had bitten into her, so did I, but harder and more deeply. There was not much flesh to clamp between my teeth, and very little blood issued from it. I tasted more of her skin than of the red liquor that trickled thinly into my mouth. It was a taste that reminded me faintly of delicate Iranian caviar. Was it the trace of an ancient sea-magic, the pull of the moon on the tide within her as on the tides of oceans? Could I even have tasted what I thought I had: a scintilla of the suggestion of scented Caspian spray and roe of luscious life cut fresh from dead wombs? How had the taste of skin and droplets of blood brought such an imagining to my senses? All I knew was that this taste, this insinuation of a taste, real or imagined, left me hungering for more.
I drew a hot bath for her, lathered her and washed her all over with neem oil soap, lingering long not only on the cut on her back but on her breasts and the secret beauty between her legs. Her hips rose to the level of the bathwater as I lathered there until her hips sank once again and she quaked and there came from her a small deep sound, like a last gasp before drowning, or a first gasp after being saved from it. Only then did she seem self-conscious of the scar near to where I had lathered her to orgasm, the scar where she had been stitched. I felt that she wanted neither my hand nor my eyes on it, even clouded as it was beneath the soapy water and further obscured by the dimmed lights and steam.
I wrapped her in a big soft towel and dried her. I swabbed the cut with peroxide and rubbed some thick vitamin E on it with my fingertip. She smiled and raised her lips to mine. When I took her lower lip between my teeth, she stepped back and her smile did not return until she sat in my robe beside me on the couch, sipping Roquette 1797 from a pony glass. I had finally found some good parmigiano reggiano and had bought a hunk with a good deep tawny layer beneath the rind. I broke off pieces of it with a narrow chisel, put them on a plate, drizzled some unfiltered olive oil over them, ground some black pepper over them, peeled a blood orange, added the segments to the plate, and laid it down beside her glass of absinthe.
I wanted to talk to her about stone houses and rolling hills and sunlight and shadows in the pines. I wanted to talk to her about the difference between hunting and infidelity. But I said nothing. She was stroking my shin with her bare foot, and it felt good. I thought of the odd faint taste of caviar that I had experienced. I thought of the watery slightness of the blood, barely enough to moisten my lips and mouth and evoke that faint odd taste. There was not much blood, hardly any, to be drawn from the capillary vessels where I had broken her skin. There were not many nerve endings in that part of the body, either. You could stick a pen, an index finger, a comb, anything to that part of someone’s back and tell them it was a gun or a knife, and they would never be able to feel that it was not. It was a trick that every mugger knew, the principal anatomy lesson of the school of crime. I wondered what she had felt when I bit her there. I wondered if she felt anything there now. It had been somewhat like taking a mere few drops of light, bracing aperitif or—that impossible taste—a mere smidgen of caviar from a dainty little mother-of-pearl spoon. Something that was so very deliciously satisfying while intensifying the appetite that rendered it satisfying. Something so wonderfully satisfying and so maddeningly unsatisfying at the same time. This effect was quite perversely pleasant, like catching sight of a wondrously beautiful bird in the instant that it vanished in flight from the visible sky.
In Vientiane one late afternoon, in the ghostly quiet before owl-light descended, I wandered through the winding dirt streets on my way back to the old hotel where I was staying. I had spent the day on my hip and on my back in an opium den, smoking and dreaming, smoking and dreaming, on the rotten wood-plank floors of paradise. A chicken crossed before me in the dust as I made my way. The moment I saw the chicken I knew why it was crossing that road. Utterly and truly and precisely, as if—no, not as if, but simply as—its mind and purpose were conveyed to me in a beam of irrefutable revelation, I knew. A life of “Why did the chicken cross the road?” A life of “To get to the other side.” It was over. I knew. And what I knew, the inestimable truth of this sudden supernatural knowledge, was so overwhelming and life-altering that I felt that it would imbue my days and guide me ever thence. The knowledge filled me. I could never, would never breathe another breath that was without this knowledge that had claimed my mind and my existence.
By the time I made it to the next bend in the dirt road, maybe a distance of three or four yards, I had completely forgotten why the chicken crossed the road. The evaporation of this knowledge has tormented me ever since. I know that I will never recapture it. My only consolation is that I knew, if only for a fleeting, fated instant, why the chicken crossed the road. This great and mystical knowledge was mine. For that instant I had and I knew what no other human being ever had or ever knew.
For some reason, or from some idle misfiring of synapse and neuron, I thought of this now. Something so wonderfully satisfying and so maddeningly unsatisfying at the same time. The chicken that crossed the road, the sea spray and the moon and the tides, droplets from capillaries and gushings from arteries, living happily ever after, and the hunt without which there could be neither happiness nor ever after, even the dead monkeys and the exorcism and laying to rest of them. The more Melissa’s bare foot softly stroked my shin, the more I felt myself falling into a shallow trance in which images and thoughts flowed in otherworldly harmony.
How I wished I could have opium again. The real stuff, the good stuff, the best stuff in the world. I could go out and find within a mile of where I lived a gun, heroin, crack, whatever I wanted. But not opium, not the most beatific of drugs. Not here, not in Europe, nowhere but in parts of Asia, and even there it was growing more rare as well, so much more profitable was it when processed into heroin. Everyone who had ever claimed they could get me opium in the city had turned out to be a liar out to impress with empty words or a fool who believed the hard black little pieces of foul matter he had purchased was real opium, and that, even if it were, it could be smoked in a hash pipe.
Yes, I wished I could have opium again, the sweet smoke of the one true heaven again. To cling to the young flesh in the heat of the vital flame, to draw from that young flesh the warm blood, calidum innatum, of new life, the rekindling of dying embers from the power and pleasure of that vital flame. To have this paradise and to enhance it with the paradise of opium too—it was a dream, this nocturne of blood and opium. Some dreams were not without a sublime magic of their own.
I imagined a long ivory pipe with a golden saddle, a lustrous yellow jade bowl, rich gold-edged cloisonné end bands, and shadow-wood tips; a blue and white Ming porcelain jar full of rich putty-soft chestnut-colored opium, its unique scent perfuming the air; a chased silver and cut-glass oil lamp, a layout of ivory-handled fine steel needles, scrapers, wick trimmers, spoons, tweezers, cleaning rod, and sable brush on a black lacquer tray inlaid with mother-of-pearl.
I imagined a small pool of fresh warm blood in a gold and enamel drinking bowl that bore the image of the protective spirit-creature, sword in mouth, beneath the octagonal symbol of the Chinese Eight Trigrams that was painted, its colors long fading, on a piece of wood nailed above the rickety door atop the rickety stairs at the entrance to the opium den.
I took a picture of that image with a cheap disposable camera and later sent it to ethnologists, anthropologists, scholars of Eastern religions, mythology, and symbolism, heads of Oriental studies at universities, curators of Oriental collections at museums, experts on the primitive magic, primitive art, primitive culture, and history of the region. None of them could identify the source and exact meaning of it beyond associating it with an animism of an ambiguous nature. They could not tell if it was good or evil. Only one of them, a professor at Columbia, quoted the fourteenth-century Yü-li Tzu of Liu Chu: “Can it be that what man regards as evil, the gods regard as good?”
I did not care if he was a god or a demon, that mad figure with the blade clenched in his mouth. And god or demon, I did not care of what. As for whether it was a numen of good or evil, the wisdom of Liu Chu had taken care of the idea that that there might be meaning in the answer to a question such as that. I gave a name to that image. La beauté de diable. It was a beauty, blessed and damned, that was everywhere, in every thing. Everything. And everything, the all of it, could no longer break the barriers of my mind. For my mind had no more barriers. It could flutter like a butterfly on a silent hilltop and devour the cosmos at once.
Everything. It was what I wanted. It was what I felt. It was what I would have. Everything.
The knife between my teeth, or what was left of them, felt good. The soothing, entrancing caress of Melissa’s bare foot entered into my imaginings. Their still-life images took on life. Lost in the dreamlike flow of what passed behind half-closed eyes, I watched myself remove the knife from between my teeth and lay it down between the inlaid lacquer tray and the softly gleaming drinking bowl.
Sky. Earth. Thunder. Wind. Water. Fire. Mountain. Marsh. The Eight Trigrams. The everything. And the god-eyed, devil-eyed guy whose face looked out commandingly, angrily, all-seeingly beneath the suit of eight of everything. And the chicken, the giver and the taker of knowing; the chicken who crossed that dusty road.
There seemed to be music from very far away: the single piano notes, woven through deep silence, of Pärt’s Alina, each note an evocation of myriads of subtle emotions, the subdued summoning of an ancient astrology, the slow bearing away of a soul by the evening tide, a meditation on the dusk and decline of magic, a melancholy star in the black of the endless night before time.
But there was no music. It was in my head. Or somewhere in me. The very-far-away in me.
Blood and opium, opium and blood. And sky and earth, and thunder and wind, and water and fire, and mountain and marsh. Blood on the shadow-wood pipe tip as I sucked deep and long. The vapors and the blood entering my body. Animism. The body ascending to where the spirit beckoned. Anima mundi. Christ, I was dying for Chinese food. Not real Chinese food. It was good old New York Jew Cantonese food I craved. Shun Lee would not deliver downtown. Liberty View, which was downtown, would not deliver at this time, period. There wasn’t a good old-fashioned Chink restaurant left in Chinatown since the old Mandarin Inn shut down a lot of years ago. There was always China Red on Chambers Street. No, forget about that joint. I thought of taking a taxi up to Shun Lee and getting a shopping bag of takeout. No, fuck that. I’d eat a couple of salami sandwiches and then I wouldn’t give a damn about the Chinese food. My eyes were closed now. Near to the open porcelain opium canister, the pipe, the layout, the bowl of blood, the knife, there were open wire-handled Shun Lee takeout containers of roast pungent duck, steamed dumplings, prawns with garlic and scallions, twice-cooked pork, and dry shredded crispy beef.
I made the salami sandwiches, throwing them together on some dry, staling pumpernickel with slices of genetically modified tomato and the all but tasteless mozzarella that I had bought in a pinch at Glucoplastics. Never buy shrink-wrapped, Saran-wrapped, or any other PVC-wrapped food.
When I returned to the couch with the sandwiches on a paper plate, I saw that Melissa was bent over her big baggy black leather purse, which was on the easy chair across the room. She took from it a beat-up, dog-eared paperback, brought it to the couch, and sat down by my side.
I was pleasantly impressed, upon seeing the condition of the book, that she had taken such care with the book that she borrowed from me. It could have been worse. I knew someone who, if she liked a book, chewed on it like a slavering dog as she read it. Maybe Melissa had picked up the paperback used and on the cheap, and it was already pretty beaten-up when she got it. I didn’t say anything. It was her book. She could do whatever she wanted with it or to it. I saw that the book was Steppenwolf.
Hermann Hesse. Every girl read Hesse. Him and Rumi. Between their first period and their first decent paycheck, even if they would never read another book in their lives, there were Hesse and Rumi.
“Do you like Hesse?” she said.
At least she didn’t say his name as if it rhymed with less, or yes. A lot of people did. But then again I wouldn’t have expected that of her. She pronounced it, like almost everybody who didn’t rhyme it with less or yes, with a schwa at the end, so that it sort of rhymed with the way Simon, the black buggy driver in Faulkner’s Sartoris, said “Yessuh,” or the way Rochester, the black chauffeur in The Jack Benny Program, later said the same thing. This is how I said it for most of my life, feeling self-satisfied with this lint speck of presumed erudition. Then, about forty-five years after I advanced from the yes to the yessuh pronunciation, it was revealed to me that the final vowel of his name was really a Germanic long e, not a short one. Properly spoken, the name Hesse rhymed with essay. Hes-say. So I felt that I was in no standing to take it upon myself to correct anyone who was of the yessuh or even the yes persuasion.
“Yeah,” I said, “as a matter of fact I do. I read Siddhartha and Demian, and I liked them a lot. I wanted to read Magister Ludi but it seemed too long. But, yeah, I really liked the ones I read.”
“How about this one? I found it in the garbage near school the other day, and I’m really getting into it.”
“You know, to tell you the truth, I don’t know if I read that one. If I took a look at it, I might remember. But I don’t think I did.”
“I bet you would remember this one if you had read it,” she said with an inscrutable archness.
She skimmed the dog-eared pages until she found the dog-eared page she was looking for. It looked to be about a third of the way into the book.
“The main character is some guy about ten years younger than you. Some guy named Harry, and he’s really losing it.”
I didn’t like where this was going. Younger than me. Really losing it. I chewed at my sandwich. Fuck those Chinks who wouldn’t deliver downtown. Fuck Hermann Hesse. And that rhymed with yessuh. And fuck this Harry guy, this sputum from a sputtering pen and nothing more. And fuck Whole Foods too.
“And he writes this poem.” She looked down at the dog-eared page. “I sort of wasn’t paying too much attention when I read it. My mind was sort of wandering. Then this jumped out at me.” She cleared her throat and, without removing her eyes from the page, read four lines aloud, as if rapt:
The lovely creature I would so treasure,
And feast myself deep on her tender thigh,
I would drink of her red blood full measure,
Then howl till the night went by.
I no longer cared where this was going. When verse and a salame sandwich vied, verse lost, no matter how much the salame sandwich left to be desired. How could they call this shit mozzarella? How could they charge three bucks for a half-pound shrink-wrapped blob of it? How could I have bought it? I never entered that fucking Whole Foods without stealing something. I had a drawerful of Quince Body Moisturizer and other extravagantly priced Dr. Hauschka skin-care products. There were days when I had three pounds of Kosher Valley chicken under my belt and a pound of Health Valley butter in my pocket. This organic shit sucked, but you couldn’t beat the price. I looked forward to the spring morel season, even more to the white matsutaki season in the late fall. The formality of waiting in a checkout line or pausing at a cash register was very rare. I even well worked the honor system in the coffee department, where you scooped your own beans from false-bottomed barrels and wrote the variety and price look-up code on the bag you put them in, whole or ground. I liked some kind of French roast, which I ground for a paper-cone drip into a bag whereon I indicated it to be some cheap shit, Morning Buzz or Café Blend or whatever it was, that cost a fraction of what was in the bag. It was an honor system, for few things were as dishonorable as allowing yourself to be played for a sucker. Yes, they may have been out to rip me off, but I was beating them at their own racket.
My most memorable coup was perhaps the four-pound châteaubriand filet that protruded from my lower flank and hip like an elephantine colostomy bag about to burst all over the Ancient Harvest quinoa. Then there was that two-foot organic sprouted-grain baguette that, with one end tucked into my sock and the rest of it running hidden up my trouser leg, lent me a quite distinguished limp.
Natural. Organic. Dog shit was natural and organic. A puddle of piss left in the gutter by a drunken bum was natural and organic. Potassium cyanide was natural and organic (with a periodic-element pedigree, no less). And unlike the salmon at Whole Foods, dog shit wasn’t artificially colored.
I remembered walking into Buccellati on Madison one day a few years back. There was only one customer, an elderly matron who seemed to be in the process of both croaking and buying about a million bucks’ worth of jewelry. The armed guard must have gone out for coffee, and the lone saleslady was so wrapped up in catering to and reaping the fortune of the windstorm buying spree of the decomposing matron, that a bracelet of diamonds, sapphires, and rubies lay right there in the open, half on and half off its plush black-velvet display cushion, on a showcase counter.
The fat kike with the loupe I took it to in Newark offered me twelve grand cash, so I figured it was worth twenty-five. I was wrong. Another fat kike with another loupe gave me thirty a few months later. Yahweh only knows what he got for it.
From one end of Kosher Valley to the other. In the wrong direction. Yea, though I walk through the aisle of the shadow of sugary death…
So why had I paid for rather than boosted this misbegotten little ball of gypsum-like mozzarella? I chewed and swallowed, none too pleased with myself or my sandwiches. Goddamn fucking Chinks.
“What was it that made those lines jump out at you?” I asked.
A smile came over her face, and that arch look returned. “You’re kidding,” she said.
“So that made you think of me. Is that what you think of me?” I said. “That I’m some kind of monster?”
I was being defensive. She wasn’t even Chinese. She wasn’t even a team member of the Whole Foods cheese department. I took a deep breath, remembered what she meant to me.
She was more than forty years younger than I, and her tone had the mature, measured, calm, and somewhat amused forbearance of a mother dealing with a recalcitrant child.
“No,” she repeated. “It made me think of you, yes, but not as you say. It made me think of us. I read those lines over and over, and the more I read them, the more excited I became. I was on the subway, and I kept wishing more and more that I was with you, just the two of us, alone, together. I missed my stop. I got out and walked. I realized I had memorized the lines without knowing it, just by reading them over and over. I kept repeating them to myself as I walked. Every step I took, I became more conscious of the friction of my panties and my pants on my pussy. I felt my thighs rubbing together as I walked. It felt good. It felt too good. I just kept getting more and more excited, until I felt that if I were thrown down to the cold concrete and raped, it wouldn’t really have been rape. It would have been part of the poem. The real rapist would’ve been me. And it was you that I saw throwing me down. You. I can’t explain it. You raping me, and me raping you. But how could two people rape each other at the same time? Not as some silly game, but for real. How could that be? It wasn’t what rape was. It was beyond that. It was everything rape was, but it was different. It was more.”
She was no longer talking to me. The mature, calm, and forbearing mother had left the room, had left the night, had never been. And she was not talking to hear herself talk, or to ward off with words phantoms of torment that thrived on silence. No. What she was doing was trying, impossibly, desperately, to parse the inflections of feelings that lay outside the known grammar of feeling.
Communication is a shoddily cobbled shoe encrusted with the muddling sludge of time, trampling, and ill wear. We speak of Isis, unaware that, in the vowel-less phonetics of Egyptian hieroglyphs, the symbols of the throne and the loaf that signified her name give us not Isis but Jst. And we speak of Jesus, he of a later mythology; but how many of those who yet kneel unto him know that this is a name that he never would have recognized or answered to, for his name was Yeshua? And we say of any of the elemental turnings of nature that we can “smell it in the air”; yet the word book we might use to more precisely express our perceptions remains unopened by most of us, who with a single word, petrichor, could describe the pleasing scent brought by rain after long days of warm, dry weather. The word was welded from two Greek words, the second of them being ichor, the ethereal blood that ran in the veins of the gods and the goddesses. From the first babblings of earliest childhood to the dimwitted pretensions of eloquence uttered in age, we pass most of our lives unable to communicate effectively what we feel, think, or want to say. Like trying to work wood or metal without tools, we can’t even articulate our worst stupidities, let alone the few worthy perceptions that attach themselves to us by accident. Unless helped out posthumously by historians, how many of us can even string together a cogent cheap platitude of parting on our deathbed? The tired saying was all too often true: if you remain silent, people will take you for a fool; if you speak, they will know you to be one.
But Melissa was no fool. I cannot say that I understood all of what she was trying to say, any more than she herself did. Her words, however, lighted on places in me where I felt that understanding slept and was about to wake. The more she spoke, the more I admired her. She already knew what most people never learn. It was what Homer knew: that words were for war, and not for surrender. Even if she was unaware that she knew this, she did. Like a rare and beautiful creature of an exotic vanishing species who knows no others like itself but only the drabber beings that flourish in multitude around it, she may have felt herself merely to be different, and to be isolated by that difference. It was up to me to show her that what she might be mistaking as lowly difference from the flock was in fact the rare beauty that constituted transcendence, a difference of a very special kind.
“And what did you do when you got home?” I asked her.
She looked straight ahead for a moment or so, as if now trying to choose her words carefully. Then, seeming to discard any such attempt, she simply spoke the words that had been there waiting to be said:
“I raped myself.
“I masturbated like crazy. I bit my arms as I was doing it. I slapped myself. I snarled dirty things at myself. It was like there were two me’s. It really did feel like I was raping myself. And I thought of you, and we were raping each other. And I felt myself beginning to come, and I told myself I was going to hold myself back and rush over here and rip open my coat and finish it here, in your face. All sorts of things. And then I just exploded. I came and I came again. And I fell asleep.” Here she paused again. “And before I fell asleep, I looked around in the dark with my eyes open, and I knew you weren’t there, and I said ‘I love you.’ And I was saying it to both of us.”
“What did it feel like?”
“Saying ‘I love you’?”
“No. The self-rape. You raping me and me raping you at the same time?”
“It was all in my head.”
“But what did it feel like? What did what was in your head feel like?”
“It was almost too much. It was like being in a storm that was so bad I had to close my eyes. It was like I could feel the force of the winds and all these windblown things hitting me and flying past me, but I couldn’t see what they were.”
“When you say you closed your eyes to it, do you think that could mean you closed your mind to it?”
“I don’t know. All I know is that I wanted to feel it a lot more than I wanted to see it. I didn’t care what it was, I just wanted to feel it.”
“And it felt good? You weren’t afraid of what you couldn’t see?”
“It felt more than good. It felt fucking great.”
She seemed lost in that remembered feeling that was hers alone. She slowly stood, returned the beat-up paperback to her bag. She took a cigarette from my pack, lit it with my lighter, and sat back down. I had not seen her smoke before.
“What was really weird was that the whole thing, whatever it was, didn’t even have a name. I never heard of any kind of sex, any kind of anything, that didn’t have a name. That sort of shook me up a little. Like I had gone beyond what was known. Like I had gone beyond what was even imagined. I mean, they had words for guys who fucked dead bodies. Words for guys who got off disemboweling live children. I read a whole paper once on how Proust liked to jerk off while he stuck hatpins through rats. But there was nothing for this. Not a name, not a word. Bernini made a statue of Saint Teresa swooning while Jesus fucked her brain. They called it ecstasy. They called it—what’s that other word they called it?”
I shrugged and grimaced indifferently with ignorance.
“Oh, come on, you know. You of all people. That word they only use when they’re talking about her.”
“I really don’t know.”
“Transverberation. Yeah, ecstasy, transverberation. And they put it in the Vatican. Nobody was going to make a statue of me raping myself, a statue of me raping you while you raped me. But it was ecstasy. And it was transverberation, whatever the hell that means. But it was way more.
“They say that if a fly flies too high it gets sucked off into space. I felt like one of those flies. Fancy words, dirty words, the whole taxonomy of sex and sin: it’s all down there somewhere, and here I am, up here in dark space without any gravity to get my little fly-ass back to where it came from.”
“Does that scare you?”
“A little. But this is all just—I don’t know. If it does scare me a little, it’s all just part of that other thing.”
“What other thing?”
“That thing without a name. That thing, whatever it is, that feels so fucking great.”
She then fell still. Though she was not looking at me, or at anything, I could see on her face the most serenely beguiling smile that I had ever seen, certainly on her, maybe on anyone. It made Mona Lisa look like she was taking a pleasant shit and nothing more.
“Do you want to rape me?” I asked her.
“I don’t think I can.” Only then did the smile on her face ease and become imperceptible. “I don’t think it would work that way. I think I can only rape you by being raped by you.”
Without thought, without hesitation, with nothing but a sudden white heat in my mind and body, I grabbed her by the neck, jammed my hand down her panties, and rammed my fist up her cunt. She screamed and clawed at me, and I tore down her T-shirt and sank my teeth into her breast without any foreplay of lip or tongue. She struck me as the blood, full and strong, entered my mouth. I smacked her in angry response. She pulled violently at my arm to remove my fist from her, and I drove it in deeper, deeper again, as I sucked the blood relentlessly from her. She punched my back. I wrenched my fist from her cunt, and with both hands pried open her clenched jaw and let loose a good amount of her own blood from my mouth into hers. I blocked her breath with my hand until she swallowed and gagged. As she made to strike me again I grasped her wrist and forced her to smear herself with the blood that still flowed from her breast. I shoved her aside. I was panting like a beast, and so was she. Our bodies loosened, our breath subsided. We looked as if we had overcome a wild boar and feasted on it raw with our bare hands. Glancing at each other, our bellies moved with mild, soundless laughter.
“I love you,” she said.
How I had yearned to hear those words from her, and how happy it now made me to hear them. I felt blessed. I felt as if I could close my eyes and sleep in bliss in her embrace.
We talked awhile, wanderingly, softly, sleepily.
“So what do we call that? Me raping you and you raping me?”
“Do we need to call it anything?”
“No, I guess not, not really.”
“Because we can.”
She perked up, shot me a look, and said, “You mean this is something known after all? You mean everything I’ve been feeling and trying to explain, it’s not something unknown? You mean it’s not new? I’m not a freak? It has a name?”
“Not exactly. But we can give it one.”
The perkiness ebbed. She looked quizzical and confused, then simply, deflatedly confused.
“You know,” I said. “It’s funny. Greek and Latin are such vast, nuanced languages. Especially when it comes to sex. I mean, there were words in Greek like phoinicizein, which meant to lick a woman’s cunt while it was bleeding. One single word to say what it would take a sentence to say in English.”
It occurred to me that I should have used a different example. Her own cunt might be sore and bleeding from the violence of my fist. All I could do was hurry on to another example that might throw a cloak on the one I had thoughtlessly given.
“We took the word fellatio from Latin. And, sure enough, fellatio meant sucking cock. But we never bothered with the Latin word irrumatio, which represented a fine distinction. With fellatio the mouth was active. It performed on the cock. With irrumatio, the mouth was passive. It got fucked like a cunt.
“But what’s funny is that with all this sexual eloquence and precision, neither Greek nor Latin had a single word that referred specifically to rape.”
I was too lazy, too tired, to go into the library to fetch my copy of The Latin Sexual Vocabulary or Forberg’s Manual of Classical Erotology, or to lug out the big, heavy Oxford Latin Dictionary or the big, heavy Liddell-Scott Greek-English Lexicon. But I knew I was right.
“The Latin word rapere or raptare—they were both more or less the same—had a dozen or more different meanings, having to do with seizing, abducting, stealing, this, that, the other thing. But only one of those meanings came close to what we commonly mean by the word rape. It’s a fucking mystery. Maybe you should write a paper on it for school.
“Anyway, rapere and raptare are all we got. That’s where we get our word rape from. And also—and here’s another pisser—also the word rapture.” I paused, recalling all the feelings that she had tried so hard to explain and simultaneously seeing a beam of light issue from what I had just said. “Rape and rapture. Linguistic twins. Maybe twins in ways that go far deeper than that.”
I felt that I should have stopped there, but my weary mind maundered on, and my mouth along with it. I heard myself saying things about the shifting, sharing of roles of violator and victim, about “symbiotic ferocity,” about “bilateral rape” and “equipollent rape.” I had no idea from which yawning crevice of my drowsy brain that one came from. I had no memory of ever having used the word equipollent, and I wasn’t even sure if it meant what I thought it did. I was sleepily aware once again of her search for a word, a phrase, a name that might bring her some sense of solace by lending definition to the screaming formless banshees of her inexpressible feelings. I muttered the words “raptus aequus”—equal rape. How stupid they sounded. I thought of what they called “the spintrian postures,” traced to the endless pursuits of pleasure of Tiberius, and defined most wonderfully by Thomas Blount, in a manner that could but barely escape memorization, in his dictionary of 1656 as “pertaining to those that seek out, or invent new and monstrous actions of lust.” Forberg’s manual enumerated the postures to be ninety. But, as shown by Melissa and countless others through the ages, this list of erotic variations was far from complete. One that had always stuck in my head was paedico paedicator, “a pederast pedicated.” As this posture was described as spintriae tres, involving three participants, there could be no doubt that the butt-fucker was simultaneously being butt-fucked while butt-fucking. There seemed to me a certain music to both the sound and meaning of this one.
“Raptor raptatur,” I said, first whispering it to myself, then saying it aloud. The rapist raped. Spintriae duo. Perfect. I repeated the phrase again: “Raptor raptatur.” Then, even though this phrase had never appeared in Latin, I said, as if it were a definition to be found in the commonest Latin dictionary: “A rapist raped while raping.”
“Rap-tor rap-ta-tur,” she said, pronouncing the words with a mock gravitas, in a cleverly understated burlesque of full and solemn imperial cadence. “I am she who rapes while being raped. I am she who rapes herself.”
She looked to me, grinning crookedly. There was caked blood in her ponytail. The dried blood on her face was inescapable of notice all along, but I had not until now seen the dark glistenings that matted her schoolgirl hair. The rape of the lock.
“What about that part?” she said. “She who rapes herself. What about that?”
I immediately coined the word autoraptus, then just as immediately cast the coin into the gutter. The prefix auto- was Greek; raptus was Latin. It was an abomination to make a word by forcing a marriage of Greek and Latin roots.
What was the Greek equivalent of raptare? I couldn’t remember. All I could remember, or seemed to remember, was that it was ungainly, unwieldy, and started with an alpha. Fuck it. Even if it worked, it would involve getting up off the couch. I was even having trouble remembering the Latin reflexive pronouns. I really was falling asleep. Ah, sui. Yeah. Sui, sui, sui. Self. Sui juris, one’s own master. All right, then, so what was the genitive singular of raptor? Same thing. Sui raptoris. One’s own rapist. Sui-raptus. Self-rape.
“Oh, that,” I said, as if recalling something from a child’s primer. “She who rapes herself. One’s own rapist is sui raptoris. As for the deed itself, self-rape, that’s sui-raptus.”
Somehow all of this seemed to make her feel better. And so I said:
“You’re a goddess, baby. The goddess whose name is dea raptor raptatur. The goddess who rapes while being raped.
“Somewhere incense burns, solitary figures search the constellations, and the priestly and the low utter sighs of prayer without knowing why.”
She wiped some dried blood from her lips with the back of her hand. She looked at the back of her hand. She looked at me. There were still stains of darkening burgundy on her mouth, and it was hard to tell if she was smiling or smirking.
“You just made all that up, didn’t you?” she said.
“What part of it?”
“All of it.”
“No.”
“The part about the goddess.”
“Every goddess is made up. Every god is made up. That doesn’t detract from them. Look at Isis.”
I had mentioned Isis not long before. But when I now said her name—or, rather, the name that Herodotus had somehow Greeked from what he had heard in Egypt in the Late Dynastic Period—I felt an uncanny consciousness of that mysterious and unsettling scrap of paper, in my scrawling hand but unrecognized by me, that I had kept secreted in a drawer since inexplicably finding it on my desk one morning not long ago. It had been for the most part out of mind as well as out of sight until this very moment. I experienced a quick wave of anxious unease.
“Jst.” The strange sound burst from her, a sudden glottal hiss, giving me a start and warding off whatever aftermath might have followed that wave that passed through me.
“Or however the fuck they said it. Look at her. The Greeks and Romans turned her into Artemis and Diana, Aphrodite and Venus. The Christians turned her into the Virgin Mary. All of them made up, just like her. But she’s still there. Her beauty, her power, her magic—everything, undiminished. People die, but what they make up, what they wish to exist over them, what they make up to embody everything that they can never be, everything that can never be, period—that doesn’t die. It’s eternal.”
“So you made me up. I didn’t think they were making up any new gods these days.”
“Are you kidding? Every breath, every breeze bears a god or a goddess waiting to be born, a theophany there for the taking. You know those lines on the refrigerator? In that same poem he summons the four hundred gods of drunkenness—‘The four hundred gods / of drink alone / sat with him / as he died / in pieces’—which never existed until that very moment when he made them up.”
Those lines had always scared me, and I had always wondered if they had scared Olson as he conceived and wrote them down.
“Not one god for him,” I said. “No, four hundred of them in one fell swoop. There was a maker up of gods who thought big, all right.
“That statue of that saint getting transreverberated by that made-up Jesus. That other statue there of that made-up Virgin Mary holding the corpse of that made-up transreverberator. That painting The Birth of Venus. That stuff’s pretty to look at, but it’s just a bunch of stone and paint, a bunch of made-up stuff about made-up gods and made-up goddesses.
“At least you’re real. You’re right here, sitting right next to me. And what I said about making up that goddess. It’s not true. You are a goddess. You embody what others can’t be, what others can barely imagine. That beauty, that power, that magic. It’s in you, and it’s forever. All I made up was the name of the goddess. And I pieced that together from words made up by the same people who made up gods and goddesses. Every goddess has to have a name. Of course, you could always just stick with Melissa.”
“I don’t feel like a goddess,” she said. But it was obvious that she was feeling pretty damned good.
“If you did, you’d be unbearable,” I said. “And you’d end up in your arrogance like Jesus in his. Look at that fairy tale. Tormented for forty days and forty nights. All just to end up getting nailed to a cross in his diaper.”
“The temptation of Christ.”
“Yeah. As opposed to the temptation of Louie the Lug.”
“I never got that. I mean, what was he supposed to have been tempted by?”
“By exactly what he wanted. Dominion over all earthly kingdoms. That was the main one, with the offer coming from Satan, the one guy who could probably actually deliver. There was a whole mess of other temptations, too, but they don’t go into most of them.” My eyes were closing again. I lit a cigarette. “I can tell you one thing. This salami sandwich wasn’t one of them.”
“Do I still have a lot of blood on my face?”
“It depends on what you mean by a lot.”
Yes, I thought, as I drew smoke and let my eyes close for a moment: fuck normalcy and fuck the normal. It was death and they were dead. Dante looked down upon them as being unworthy even of entering hell, calling them i vigliacchi, the lukewarm, the cowardly.
I kissed the dried blood on her lips. I said the words I had so yearned to hear from her, and had heard: “I love you.”
Her eyes were angelic. She rose silently to take a shower and prepare for bed. I sat alone, luxuriating in what I felt, which was all the more wonderful enwrapped in the comfortable warmth of deep and quiet drowsiness. The sound of the shower cascading behind the closed door of another room was soft and sylvan.
I went to her bag to get that beat-up paperback, so that I might read again the lines she had read me. I was surprised to find that, in context, the “tender thigh” and the “red blood” the character wished to drink “full measure” were those of a deer. Sweet self-raped Melissa had extracted them from the rest of the verse in a way that gave a very different impression and conjured a very different picture. As isolated by her, the tender thigh and red blood were those of a maiden; even, by the implication of her chosen and well-voiced reading, those of Melissa herself.
The discovery of this little deceit was an unexpected pleasure, like coming across a thoughtful gift that had been hidden away in anticipation of being given on a special occasion.
When I returned the book to her bag, I noticed a folded piece of paper on which the book had lain. I could see that it was a slim brochure of some kind. I took it out and opened it.
Printed on it were the words WHAT A DIFFERENCE A DAY MAKES. I was about to re-fold it and put it back where it was when I saw that it was a publication of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention.
The sound of the shower, which was no longer soft and sylvan, abruptly stopped. I sat on the couch in the dark and had another cigarette. Then I sat a little longer in the dark and had another cigarette.
By the time I went to bed, she was asleep. I did not wake her to mention the little brochure about what a difference a day makes. Nor did I sleep in bliss.