The Saline Solution Read online

  And when I got physically tired, and bored with the cycles of excitement and detachment, I had her kneel again as though she were in church praying, and then prostrate herself fully forward from the waist, her spine bent, her belly hanging, her cunt at an angle for deepest penetration, and I let myself spin off into an unobstructed movement, my pelvis shuddering rapidly as I let the energy ripple freely through my body, enjoying the crashing pleasure of the way her cunt caught my cock and held it as I slid in and out of her, and the pose of abject submission she took before me, and I let the sperm bubble through and flush out into her as I yelled in release, a hairy solipsist in the throes of a loveless orgasm.

  Gradually she let herself sink full-length on the bed, and I lay on top of her. We were in exactly the same position we had held before we started to fuck. It made everything that had happened in between seem futile. But that also seemed true of life. In all of the times we had had sex, I had never let go in her arms. I always performed, not in the adolescent sense of trying to be the best fuck she ever had, but in the more insidious way of never losing my self-consciousness. Both in and out of bed I kept my distance, and we shared no existential rushes.

  Secretly we both played the game of pretending that each of us had the power to save the other from dying.

  I suddenly became very aware of the body lying underneath me, of this human being now thinking her thoughts as I was thinking mine, perhaps as aware as I of the gap between us, and wondered whether there were such a thing as love which could erase the essential strangeness of the other. I could imagine myself after forty years looking into Lucinda’s eyes and saying, “I never did know who you were, really.” But of course, that would be no more than I would say to myself. Freud was wrong. The opposite of Eros is not Thanatos, but Absurdity.

  We got up and moved randomly around the apartment, and I drifted into the kitchen to make tea, finding a therapeutic calmness in the orderliness of the ritual.

  “Let’s bring the radio in to the city next time,” Lucinda said.

  We had taken all our electronic props to Fire Island, and when we came into the city for a few days we felt like junkies whose supply had been cut off. The thoroughness with which the noise made by the media had permeated our sense of environment was chilling. Once, when Lucinda was hitching about not having the stereo in the city, I launched into a long rap on the value of returning to one’s inner resources, and she shot back, “What inner resources?”

  I sipped the tea and looked out the window to the apartment building across the alley. The woman who was lying in bed, whatever time we looked, was still there, still wearing a slip. “She’s still there,” I said. “I envy her.” Lucinda said, “She doesn’t need anything but sleep.”

  “Why don’t you call Francis and Bertha?” I said. “Find out what time we should pick them up on Sunday.”

  “What about that Ireland thing?” she said.

  “It’s just a whim.”

  “He seemed so serious about it.”

  “I’ve known Francis for nine years,” I said. “He’s had hundreds of enthusiasms. They’re always brilliant ideas, and he is always carried away by them. And they burst within a few days, leaving anyone who changed any plans on his account a little discomfited.”

  We were going to take them with us to the Island for the rest of the season. Bertha was his new girl of several months’ standing, and the four of us had spent an evening together smoking dope and tripping out on travel and politics.

  “Ireland’s a beautiful place,” Francis had said. “And with no history of imperialism. They’re as fucked up as anybody else as people, but they’ve got a pretty clean national conscience.”

  Lucinda got very excited. “Yes,” she had said, “let’s get out of the country.” I knew she was thinking about the baby.

  I came away from the window, and lit a cagarette. “I don’t think there’s any point in going to Ireland,” I said. “There’s no peace there either. The human sickness is our addiction to fear, and we pass it on genetically. The Irish seek refuge in slavery as much as any other people. They’re Catholics, for Christ’s sake.”

  “For Christ’s sake?” she said.

  “Not for Christ’s sake. That’s the problem. They’ve taken to religion the way the Germans took to National Socialism. But organization is only the outer shell of fascism. And what would the four of us do there, anyway? Mope around like characters out of Lawrence? I can barely manage living with myself, and it’s almost impossible with you. I’m a pervert by most standards. And you’re pregnant and Bertha is into fidelity and Francis is pretending he’s straight. There’s just no point.”

  “Why do you make things so complicated?” she asked. “Why can’t we just go to Europe like ordinary people?”

  I snorted. “Ordinary people? I don’t know any ordi-many people.”

  She went into the bathroom again. This time she closed the door. I poured another cup of tea. It would be several hours until I got sleepy. I didn’t want to go out. I wondered how I would fill the time.

  II

  When, for whatever reason, a man and woman begin to live together, to share the intimacy of sex, their first contract is for exclusivity of genital contact. At first they seem to believe, and later force themselves to adhere to, the notion that this human being now in constant geographical proximity has been qualitatively transformed into some property of oneself. A woman’s cunt is her own, but her husband will not say so. The pristine articulated bond, arbitrary but conscious, soon succumbs to the corrosive power of habit, and the two of them are left with a smoldering possessiveness which is often tidied up into brisk, smiling hostility. The resulting years, no matter how varied in content, are riddled with the tension inherent in the psycho-emotional game known as marriage.

  The most invidious myth of our civilization is the idea that any form of social contract can substitute for unrelenting moment-to-moment awareness by each individual. Lucinda and I attempted to laugh in the face of necessity by assuming a relationship in which all the emotional glue of attachment would be dissolved by acid sophistication. But life has a way of brushing our paradigms aside.

  We went back to the Island. There was immediate friction between Francis and Donna, the woman who had rented and sublet the house to us and the half-dozen other summer groupers. We dumped our bags and went into Ocean Beach, figuring that the worst way to deal with the problem would be through confrontation. We walked the narrow paths in silence, thankful to be in a place where no cars were allowed.

  We went into the ice cream parlor. The vibrations were jagged and intense. I watched a thirteen-year-old girl, blonde spaghettini hair, roundly fleshy hips, a soft square ass, and a look of hungry innocence in her eyes. I sat at a table with Lucinda, facing Francis and Bertha. All around us teen-age America did its vapid dance. The juke box played a lament for the students shot at Kent State. “Four dead in 0-0-hio . . . “ The words snaked out of a very polished rhythm section. Three pinball machines let off raucous metallic shudders. A tall, big-shouldered fifteen-year-old strode across the length of the place, wearing a jacket with “Mobile Environment Engineer” written across the back over the Power-to-the-People fist done in bright red.

  “It’s amazing how in the United States every phenomenon of the left is immediately recast into a right-wing mould,” Francis said, his eyes riveted to the young Ecological Storm Trooper.

  The girl I was watching looked up and our eyes flashed. Such a sweet little cunt, bulging the jeans out. And how aware of it she was, and how she said yes with such burning naivete. My stomach dropped and I tingled clear down to my toes. Lucinda saw what was happening and feigned a look of benign amusement. I smiled insipidly at her, suddenly and fiercely hating her presence.

  “It’s actual theatre,” said Francis. “I mean, it grips my attention.” He brought his hand up and clutched at the air, making a fist. He was a painter
, but I suspected that his true art lay in poetry or dance.

  “It can’t be painted,” he said. “It has to be put on videotape.” He paused. “Do you realize that painting is the last art to lose its atemporality?” I stood in salute and went to pick up our sodas.

  By the time I came back, I had lost contact with the nymphet who would cry so beautifully the first time I made her realize the utter reality of the cock which lambasted the hard rubber walls of her tight shiny twat. I tried to spot her in the crowd and saw her staring into the eyes of a pre-teen-age hypnotist, who had sat her down and was ripping off her mind with his rap. Her face was rapt in an approximation of awe, and she was squirming in her chair.

  “Ruin,” I thought. “If I had just taken her earlier and made love to her on the beach, she would not have fallen into the hands of the Scientologists.”

  The summer season was coming to a close, and the air of unreality which is the Island’s major sociological feature had caught my mind. I was ready to freak out, but I felt trapped by Lucinda. Oddly, I didn’t miss any particular freedom of behavior, but was limited in the scope of my mind. As usual, this condition was accompanied by an increasing frequency of deja vu experiences, one of which surrounded me at that moment. “I’m going back to the house,” I said.

  We returned to find the other groupers milling around. One family was in the small alcove off the living room. The man was a teacher of physics in high school. His total understanding of the universe seemed reduced to whatever answers appeared in the back of the textbook. His wife was a woman whose face I had no trouble forgetting after each of the hundreds of times I saw her. Their son had all the moody craftiness of the ten-year-old. And their dog, named Hot Dog, was absolutely paranoid and would bark at people for hours after they’d come into the room. They were sitting around in a fuzzy silence.

  “Yes, that’s marriage,” I thought, and felt another pang in my groin at the memory of the little girl at the ice cream parlor.

  “Do you have a television set here?” Francis asked.

  Lucinda and I looked at each other, and through the door into the scene in the next room. We smiled at one another.

  “There it is,” she said to Francis.

  The four of us sat, drinking tea and smoking grass, under a Halloween lampshade some ten feet in diameter that Donna had installed. The entire house had the air of a Hitchcock movie, although most of the dialogue was out of Beckett. Once again, it was all a play. Reality was merely real. And made up of plays within plays. Lucinda and Francis and I agreeing to a momentary perception; then Lucinda and I; then Bertha and Francis; then Francis and I. Occasionally all four of us would share the moment.

  And within myself an infinity of costumes beckoned for realization. An army of identities marching through oblivion. I became light-headed with the vision as we all sat quite still in the wooden seashell of a house, listening to the sound of waves. For a long bent instant I was held in phe-nomenological thrall.

  By now I had the thirteen-year-old tied to a bed:

  She is pure motherscreaming cunt, she is quintessence of handgripping tit, she is ultimate ass begging to be fucked. I am into a stoned De Sade head, and my cock will never get soft, not once. I go and get her and get her and get her until she is as raw as the belly of a scraped artichoke leaf. Her eyes fill with tears. Her legs kick off into the sky. And finally she snaps the final thread and sails into the eye of the sun crying YES down the corridors of infinity while I bask in the great heat of her sacrifice and sing ME! ME! ME!

  “To be divisible is to be ontological,” Francis was saying.

  I looked at him. Ah yes, back to the reality of the room.

  “Somehow,” I thought, “it should be all different.” But there was no context in which to plant my dissatisfaction. The conversation went on around me. “The gun is the ultimate metaphysical argument,” I heard myself saying. I assumed that my statement somehow fit the drift of talk we were all swaying in. “Why aren’t we fucking,” I thought, instead of sitting around dropping dumb words into indifferent space?”

  Francis and I considered ourselves hip acidhead ex-reality trippers who had done all the scenes, and yet sexually we were as regular and as hypocritical as Methodists from southern Illinois. When I lived alone, I could be completely polymorphous perverse. But as soon as I got mated, I snapped right back into conventionally conditioned patterns, and did my swinging on the sly.

  This time there was an added factor. A few weeks after Lucinda and I began living together, my doctor examined me and announced a verdict of amoebic dysentery. “Do you have much homosexual activity?” he asked.

  It wasn’t a pass. He went on to declare that an epidemic was sweeping the gay world, going from asshole to cock to mouth, or directly from asshole to mouth, depending on circumstances and proclivities. He went through the ritual of prescription pad and sombre prohibitions. “If you want to protect yourself against this in the future,” he said, “no more ass-licking with strangers, and don’t suck any cocks unless you are sure they’re clean. Wash with hot soapy water first.”

  The announcement knocked me off balance. Promiscuity had been forbidden me on doctor’s orders, and I was beginning what seemed to be a rational relationship with Lucinda. It seemed a good time to experiment, and I thought I would try what for me has been the greatest perversion: monogamy.

  “I’ve decided to be faithful to you,” I said to Lucinda when I returned from his office.

  “Don’t do me any favors,” she said.

  “I thought you’d be glad,” I said.

  “Just fuck me enough,” she said. “What else you do is your own business.”

  The edge had been shaved off my project, but I appreciated her good sense. We had known each other for six years, but vaguely, through the screen of theatre workshops which formed my most intense subterranean existence for a period during the early sixties. Several times a week I would stagger through the daisy chain of neo-Stanislavskians who flutter about the upper West Side. And on occasion I would find myself involved in some scene or exercise with Lucinda. Once, during one of the Theatre of Encounter’s structured group gropes, I found myself sucking a big toe that I later learned belonged to her. And when we decided to spend the summer together, we were both surprised.

  She stood there smiling. She had a moodily voluptuous mouth, a serious ass, and a private income. “I think it would be very nice if you were faithful to me,” she said.

  I embarked on the Yoga of Fidelity. In the beginning, the discipline was exhilarating. I felt my decision like a harness holding me in check. I chose to ignore Christ’s observation that a man who lusts after a woman in his heart has already committed adultery with her, and continued to ravish most of the women I saw with my eyes. But I made no movement to act. After a while, I began to be comfortable with, and finally to enjoy, my restraint. For the first time in my life I had something which kept me from certain aspects of my sexual life.

  Like a blind man who becomes sensitive to sound, I began to tune in on the more subtle vibrations of sex. Cut loose from my fixation on penetrating all orifices, I began to notice postures and textures, poses and thoughts. Women came gradually into focus as creatures whose delight far surpassed brute copulation. I started to understand moods, and the fleeting expressions of sudden joy or emotional pain that would flit across a woman’s face became precious to see. In stores or on the street I came to realize that hundreds of thousands of women were available all the time. Once actual fucking was barred, one could feast on all the rest that is revealed simply by how sharply or softly a woman makes a gesture, like curling her fingers to caress her lips.

  But as I gained in subtlety I found myself growing in attraction for women. They might look at me quizzically, or make several attempts to approach, or begin conversations with, “Do you mind if I speak freely?” Without willing it, I was secreting seduction. It was as though I b
ecame a woman myself. My cock having been retired from all activity except with one person, and my sexual drive sublimated into pantomime, I had no trouble being one of the girls. On a number of evenings I sat on the mattress in our bedroom on the Island, three or four women around, all of us in varying stages of undress, Lucinda serving tea, the Stones playing, and the vibrations as thick as in a locker room. The softer I got, the more I lay back, the less I thought about anything at all, the more irresistible I became. I was at an exquisite edge, and the closer I hewed to my principle of fidelity the greater my options grew, and the higher the stakes of the game. The question was: when would I cash in the chips of my splintered vow?

  When Lucinda announced that she was pregnant, my fantasy enlarged to almost totally overshadow reality. I would not only transmute my nature at a stroke and be monogamous, I would also enter the realm of fatherhood. The archetypal heroes trotted out to have their day. I took all the predictable trips on the mystery of heredity, and mused on the power of influence one has over a newborn infant. I ranged from the practical to the sentimental, and milked the idea of having a child for every last symbol.

  Yet, at heart, I had no more feeling about it other than an unusually sharp curiosity.

  Francis was pasting collages in his diary, writing around them with multicolored felt-tip pens. The page in front of him read, “Suigenocide. Entropy is the final solution.” Bertha read. Lucinda was lost in revery.