03
It was after a particularly productive session, during which Shapiro had been working with Monica on being more assertive (his technique was to provoke her so as to get her to argue with him), that I came home to find Monica rolling naked on a sheet of plastic that was covered with a mixture of paints. When she saw me she stared up longingly, spread her legs, and started to play with herself. Even I knew that body painting and action painting had nothing in common, but this time I kept my mouth shut. She was already turned on. She didn't need me. My reluctance to demean her was an act of love. But what resulted was a far cry from our usual passion. We made love, but the feeling of oneness was gone.
It remained to be seen whether the mixture of masturbation and self-assertion could bring about the hot sex we'd had when I was pulling her by the hair, pinching her, and slapping her around. And I didn't have to wait long to find out. General Shapiro had ignited something I had never seen in Monica before. In the past, when we went into a session, Monica would fold her arms around her chest and wait for Shapiro to make a statement, which she would then pull apart. She had spent a good portion of the couples counseling trying to attack his credibility. Now it was apparent that General Shapiro had something she wanted. She went after his ideas as greedily as she grabbed my dick when she was horny. Her lust for knowledge was becoming as great if not greater than her lust for sex. She was opening her mind with the same abandon with which she'd spread her legs.
"You're an intelligent woman," General Shapiro said at one point. Still acting the dumb broad, Monica looked around to see if someone else was in the room. Shapiro caught it. I crossed my fingers, hoping he wasn't going to remark on it. Monica still had her defensiveness. When Shapiro said something about her, she took it as a criticism, even when he meant to be helpful. Of course, Shapiro couldn't resist being right.
"Who are you looking for?" he barked. "See, that's my point. It's striking how you have no belief in your own abilities." Naturally Monica grew silent, but she was learning instead of fighting back. The next day when I came home from my AA meeting, I found her sitting naked in the upholstered armchair that sat in front of the TV. She'd pulled her legs up against her chest. She had a vibrator in one hand, a paint brush in another, and a pad between her legs. She was making figures that almost looked like Chinese ideograms. She'd make a stroke with her right hand, while pressing the vibrator against her pussy with her left. She moaned softly to herself as she came, but the moaning lacked the desperation that had formerly accompanied her orgasms. It was almost like singing. After she was done, she got dressed and asked me if I wanted to go out for dinner. We hadn't gone to a restaurant since our first two dates at The Golden Cock.
I was taken aback at first. Dinner? Go out? The words had become foreign. I wasn't sure how to process them. Dinner usually meant ordering in Chinese and seeing Ting's face up against the window of the bunker as I straddled Monica's writhing body. I would be lying if I said I didn't feel a sense of loss, but I wasn't angry or frustrated. I was no more interested in getting into her pants than she was in mine, though I wasn't necessarily happy about the new state of affairs either. I was scared. What would it mean for our relationship? I needed my friends from the AA group or General Shapiro, but it would be hours before my next meeting and days before our next appointment.
"You wanna go back to The Golden Cock? I actually liked the food."
I myself felt ambivalent about The Golden Cock, but my anxiety and apprehension had made me go blank. Besides The Golden Cock, the only other restaurant that came to mind was Domino's Pizza. I said, "That's too fussy"
"You want a steak?" She frowned.
"Too greasy."
"How about Japanese?"
"I don't feel like raw fish."
As we were discussing where to go for dinner, arguing and not being able to agree on something that could never be as enjoyable as our moments of ecstatic sexuality, 1 realized this is what iti like to have a mature relationship. This is what General Shapiro has been talking about.
We decided on Frank's, a cute little place on Chapel Street, around the corner from the bus station. There were cheery waitresses with little white aprons on their gray uniforms, a maitre d' with a blue blazer, and a bathroom with one urinal and one stall, expressly designed to eliminate the possibility of extracurricular activities. There was barely room enough for an adult's knees between the toilet bowl and the stall door. I thought back fondly to the bathroom of The Golden Cock, which was larger and more spacious than the main dining room. When I'd first looked in through the large window, with Frank's painted on it in elegant script, I'd seen gray-haired men and women who seemed in many cases to be more intent on studying either the menu or the food on their plates than in paying attention to each other. Frank's provided its customers a mixture of comfort and subdued isolation. The candlelight on each table was less a prelude to romance than a memento to something that'd passed, like the candles you light in a church in memory of the dead. We were never going to fit in with this staid older crowd, but the first thing that Monica said when we were seated was, "Isn't this nice? It's pleasant, eh?" There was one tense moment when she was drawing on a pad and actually got turned on enough to stick her hand in her pants, but we'd finished dessert and were getting ready to leave anyway.
As we walked out of the restaurant, a portly matron with a cane, whose face was covered by a big red hat, ambled passed us.
"Cocksucker, I've been looking for you." I would have recognized the high-pitched voice of Heather Tnapsack anywhere. I didn't know how she'd found me, and I didn't want to know.
"Let's get out of here." I pulled Monica by the arm just as Heather started to come after me with her cane, quivering, "Duck me already, you son-of-a-bitch; I can't stand it." Monica didn't even ask what the commotion was all about. Sex-crazed old ladies were just the latest consequence of El Nino.
US
In the past, we started fucking before Ting came with the food and we were all over each other before I had finished my chow mein. By the second fuck of the evening, Ting would have already shot his load all over the window. We were no longer able to see him or he us and there were times when Monica was so turned on that she would stick the egg roll in her cunt, and I would end up finishing dinner between her legs. But recently, since we had been seeing General Shapiro again and were trying to build a real relationship, we had started watching television after dinner-something we never had time for before-and instead of fucking before dinner, we talked. Sometimes we talked about theories of art, and my homework was to avoid criticizing her, slapping her around, or pulling her hair, even if it did turn her on. I was no longer a sit-in for Pollock or DeKooning. I was just James Moran.
After we got home from Frank's, Monica flipped on the tube and we sat on the sofa and watched. One of our problems was that as we became ourselves-which happened more every daywe began to have different interests. I liked "Sixty Minutes," and Monica, "Survivor." She gravitated to reality television while I sought out the old news-magazine format. When we had just been a hot cock and wet cunt, our tastes hadn't mattered, but now we were two separate people and I had to deal with the fact that Monica could be a pain in the ass when she didn't get to see the programs she wanted.
The couples counseling seemed to be winding down, not because Monica and 1 wanted it to stop, but because General Shapiro had begun to schedule other patients for our hours. We were both confused by this behavior, though this had been his way from the start. One day he would refuse to see you unless you were coming three times a week, and a month later he would simply refuse to see you. Try as we might, we failed to come up with any explanations for these changes. We'd assumed that patients would discuss these matters with a therapist, but then again, Shapiro was a military man. During one of the last sessions, I candidly talked about my complaints and fears. When it came to his own erratic behavior, General Shapiro was uncooperative-as I knew he would be-but when I brought up the matter of our declining interest in sex, he was more forthcoming.