Just two days after we returned home from the hospital, I noticed the first real change in our relationship. I'd had to fly out of town for a one-day consultancy on a production of The Pajama Game opening in Dubuque. When I returned home that night, we were back to our usual selves. Monica had already ordered my egg roll. Ting had his nose up against the window, and Monica had her mouth tightly wrapped around my cock. As she knelt down in front of me and started to lick under my balls, making her way up the chocolate brick road, I noticed Ting's hand moving up and down. It was all reassuringly the same. What was wonderful about our relationship was our ability to do the same things all the time while getting ever greater enjoyment from them. Our ability to squeeze so much pleasure out of similar circumstances was a primitive expression of gratitude, I suppose. I thought to myself that nobody had ever sucked my cock and licked my asshole the way Monica could. I loved her technique as much as I loved her; in fact, I'd come to understand that it was her sexual technique that was the heart of my love for her.
We paid Ting after the first fuck. That way we knew all three of us were satisfied. Before eating, we'd have a second fuck. It was after the second fuck-often the most powerful in that it made me ejaculate from the very core of my she popped out with a question that had never crossed her lips before. "Could we go to the museum?" she asked as she got up to dip my egg roll in mustard before thrusting it in my mouth. General Shapiro's advice had finally penetrated her defenses.
She was speaking of our local municipal museum, which has had the same exhibit of American Indian blankets for the past quarter of a century. Considering the generally low level of social services in our area and the glaring need for things like road repair, arts funding has never been a priority. I'd done a few plays at our local regional theater, but stopped when they got a director who was a John Phillip Sousa nut; the past two seasons had been totally devoted to a thirty-hour-long tribute to Sousa that made Der Ring des Nibelungen look like an episode of "Barney," and our one opera house rarely deviates from Gilbert and Sullivan. Despite the fact I don't have the slightest interest in Indian blankets, I considered Monica's suggestion. Maybe it was just age. Time tames even the wildest stallions. Even the toughest neo-Nazi biker, who has spent half his life behind bars, starts to think about retirement communities once he gets out of jail and stops having to worry about former enemies coming up behind him with a piece of wire. Maybe Monica was ready to settle down.
However, 1 had to ask myself, did I really want to encourage her? 1 may have started the ball rolling by dragging her to Shapiro, but did 1 want to suffer the consequences? Wouldn't we disagree about the Indian blankets just as we had about other subjects on the few occasions we had talked in the past? Monica was a great fuck. Everyone grows old and dies, and someday 1'd have to deal with that, but why not enjoy it for today and worry later about what kind of rapport we'd have once our life of ferocious fucking and sucking was over.
1 wasn't going to introduce something new into our routine just to take up Monica's dare. I'm not a chance-taker at heart. I've always liked getting laid, but I'm not the kind of guy who makes a grandstand play, swinging from the nearest vine like Tarzan to get the good-looking girl. In fact, it's amazing I've gotten fucked and sucked as much as I have.
Yet somehow I knew General Shapiro made sense. You didn't order in Chinese every day because of the cuisine. It wasn't that 1 just liked sticking my joint in Monica's hot honey pot; 1 didn't like anything else anymore. Cooking, which had once been an interest, was swept under the table by the sex. Good music, books, cinema and, yes, art were all falling by the wayside because of our addiction to each other's bodies. I was living proof that when you don't employ a given human capacity, it atrophies. 1 picked up our local version of Time Out, a paper called Whats Going On In Town. The museum was open on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday from ten until five and on Fridays and Saturdays from ten until eight forty-five.
"If we go on Friday at five we can get home in time to order in and fuck." I was trying to be practical. There's no sense in making culture a matter of punishment and deprivation; that takes away from its potential to be a source of pleasure. I remembered sitting through an all-female production of Henry IV Part II in Paris, Kentucky, in which the part of Prince Hal was played by a recovering sex addict who had just gotten out of rehab. The lines, spoken in a thick Southern drawl, all sounded like a waitress asking if you wanted a refill on your coffee. My need to sit through the entire performance was just the kind of compulsiveness I wanted to spare Monica. I didn't want her feeling that going to the museum was a chore or duty or something that had to be done unremittingly in order to achieve some required level of perfection.
"We're going to have to push our late-afternoon fuck back to four."
"If we go on Thursday at four we end up killing our late afternoon fuck. Then we get home too early for our evening fuck. So we have a fuck that's neither fish nor fowl."
"Is there any possibility we could have one of our fucks while we're there and another when we get home?"
"General Shapiro wanted us to try something different."
"That's why I'm suggesting it. If this art thing is a substitute for sex, it's going to turn me on." I didn't pay attention to the warning. It seemed ridiculous to be phobic about art.
US
You've probably guessed it. Monica became as addicted to art as she was to sex. The notion she could miss any exhibit was an affront. After the Indian quilts, there was the traveling show of Flemish floral design drawings and the etchings by someone who identified herself as Charles Manson's aunt-a show she forced me to fly to Detroit to see the day it opened. We started to travel around the country to see art shows, a practice that tied in nicely with my career in the musical theater. I'd been scheduled to work on an Annie in Akron. Monica arrived on a Monday a few days after the rehearsals began. Monday is the one day you have off in a rehearsal period, and for the first time 1 could see that Monica was torn. When I looked into her eyes 1 knew she wanted to fuck, the way I know a python likes to eat live rabbits. Usually she'd have my fly open and my dick in her mouth before we'd even said a word to each other, but this time she managed to get out, "I want to see the Anais Nin…." The rest of her sentence was muffled by the suction of her lips against the shaft of my prick, although any good cryptographer could have made out what she was talking about. Through the muffled sounds and groans I managed to get the idea that Monica wanted to see an exhibit of Anais Nin's letters displayed on the first floor of the Akron Museum of Modern Art.
During the reading of an exchange between Anais Nin and Henry Miller, Monica briefly lost control. You hear about elderly people who lose control of their bowels and bladder. Our little visit to the show at the Akron should have warned me. I don't think even a genius like General Shapiro could have predicted the effect art would have on Monica. Rather than helping her to sublimate her sexual instincts, art seemed to flood her, if it's possible to imagine, with even higher levels of sexual passion. It's lucky the Akron Museum of Modern Art has few visitors and in fact, relatively few works of art. Monica got down on all fours and demanded 1 fuck her like a dog in the middle of the gallery. The Akron's one female guard turned away when she saw what was transpiring. When you run an exhibit of writing by AnaTs and Henry Miller, you expect anomalous behavior, but this wouldn't be the last time art would have an explosive effect on Monica's sexuality. I looked Monica's symptoms up on the internet. Her symptoms would later evolve into something more complex, for which General Shapiro would eventually offer a different diagnosis, but at this point it seemed to me she had contracted a condition called Maecenatism, in which patients suffer from uncontrollable sexual urges when they look at paintings and other creative works. The condition is also referred to in the literature as "negative sublimation." In normal sublimation, erotic energy is turned into art. The negative form presents the reverse scenario. Art is turned back into the erotic energy that initially fueled its creation.