I was starting to feel pangs. Now that I'd actually been separated from her and there was no chance that we could scan presences like bats in the night, my ability to conceive of her in my imagination was taking precedence over my animal side. I noticed I was going through a dramatic internal change in which I was beginning to think of her as a person instead of feeling a purely instinctual desire for an object I didn't even want to know. Our mating pattern was broken. Having short circuited the instinctual way we found each other, I began to worry about how and when I would ever be able to see her again. I was homesick. I missed her cunt, I missed my regular fuckings, I felt guilty for leaving and fearful of retribution. After all, I wouldn't have liked her pulling her cunt out from under me unexpectedly. No one likes a dick that takes a walk. I had no telephone numbers, no addresses. I couldn't call, e-mail, or send post cards. In fact, getting in touch with her at all was totally impossible since I didn't even know her name. Not only did I miss her cunt, the truth was I missed her. I missed her even though 1 couldn't remember her face or anything about her. 1 even missed the inane remarks she made when she was trying unsuccessfully to create an air of normality after sex. I didn't love her. 1'd never loved anybody except my mother, though I was becoming increasingly fond of Bill, who had also become a mother figure to me. But two things were obvious: I was experiencing separation anxiety and an almost supernatural level of horniness. Neither Giselle nor the sex club had anything to do with the latter, but the fact is, even a short break seems like an eternity when you've been fucking two or three times a night.
1 didn't want to alarm Bill or Sam, nor did 1 want to ruin their good time, but I was a loose cannon. I considered my options. I could hop on a plane, but I didn't know what awaited me on the other side; surely there'd be no welcoming party at the airport. I could try to find a hooker in Key West. But going to a hooker, for someone who has experienced weeks of mutually explosive sexuality with his partner, is like eating a Big Mac in the middle of Paris. You can get one, but does it satisfy an eroticism so intense it eradicates the boundary lines of personality? It is very difficult to communicate the noumenal essence of such ecstasy. I'm sure Kant himself would have had a hard time.
We'd passed a Zen meditation center on our way to the lap dancing place. Once 1 got on the bench, I would at least be able to cool down. 1 told Bill that 1 had an upset stomach. 1'd meet the two of them back at the hotel. 1 was sure Bill was going to offer to get Sam to drive me (in which case 1'd have to go overboard, insisting I wouldn't do anything to ruin their night), but no excuses were necessary They were too busy ogling a whole new slew of dancers. There wasn't a peep out of either of them when I said, "I'll just grab a cab out front."
I arrived in the middle of a meditation that appeared to be attended almost exclusively by sex workers. Every bench was taken up by babes whose relaxed state didn't prevent their hardened nipples from poking out of their tank tops. The oars brought back the memory of an amazing hum job my high school girlfriend gave me.1 remember it well because it occurred the same afternoon we learned Kennedy had been assassinated. We'd skipped out of school between classes so we could get to her house before her mother got home from her job as a school crossing guard. Her mother found us sneaking back into the school building. From the look on her face, I thought we were in deep trouble, but it was she who told us what had happened to the president. That was actually the beginning of my long and harrowing struggle with impotence. I was already burdened with fear about my father's jealousy of my mother and me, and on top of that I'd been having sex during a national tragedy. From then on, every time I went to bed with a woman, I worried.
My meditation was troubled. At first it was the usual long road leading to a dazzling white light, but then the light began to flutter the way a bulb does when it's not screwed in properly or the filament is about to burn out. I was immersed in a dark forest. Hot winds that smelled like perfumed fish buffeted me back and forth. 1 realized that 1 was like the character in the Almodovar film, Talk to Her (2002), a latter-day Gulliver negotiating his way in a Brobdingnagian-sized pussy (and by the way, I was a total film buff until my obsession with her came along, replacing the celluloid). The dark bushes and thick growths 1 was trudging through were her pubic hair. 1 started to sweat. I wanted to open my eyes, to get out of it, but I'm compulsive when it comes to meditating. No matter what transpires, no matter how upsetting the thoughts, I always try to walk through the feelings. Now I felt I was suffocating. In reality she suffered from cunt fart, and in the meditation her farting cunt was throwing me to the ground and taking the wind out of me. I kept waiting for the sound of the timer that would indicate the meditation was over. I'd come late for the class and the actual meditation wasn't supposed to last more than twenty minutes, but I felt as if 1'd been sitting there for hours. 1 can easily sit on a meditation bench in a seiga position, but now my legs were cramping. 1 felt claustrophobic. 1 didn't think 1 could take one more minute when the little alarm started to beep. "Okay," the leader said, "now I'm going to bring you back."
The lights went on; the candles and incense were both snuffed out. A few of the babes went to the bathroom. I don't always stay for the discussion session at these things, but I needed to talk. 1 was the first to raise my hand.
"I know there are a lot of women here, but 1 have to be honest. In my meditation today I got lost in my girlfriend's pussy." There was a loud guffaw from the back of the room. I ignored it. "I can't even remember her face, though even now I'm inundated with olfactory reminiscences. 1 feel like a blind man. She is all around me. I feel her, I smell her, I can taste her in my mouth, but I can't find her. I never have found her, but it hasn't bothered me until this moment when we are actually separated by space and time. My meditation caused added anxiety because I've been retroactively suffering from the degree to which 1 never even knew her when I was with her. Our separation has made me acutely aware of my denial in this area. All in all, it was a good meditation because it made me feel these things. I'm not dissatisfied. Sometimes meditation is supposed to bring up painful emotions." By the time I was finished, almost all the women had left the room.
I was going to apologize to the leader for causing the exodus, but a wave of indignation swept over me. I hadn't done anything wrong. I didn't deserve to be punished. If anything, it was they who were being rude. Hadn't I already suffered enough? Amidst all the pain, I came to the realization of how important her pussy was to me. I had denigrated our… I still didn't know what to call it-love? passion? physical interactiveness? — because it didn't fit into the traditional structures of white male dominated Western love. Books like Denis de Rougemont's Love in the Western World, which I'd read in college, had had a deleterious effect on my imagination, creating a feeling that love was X, sex was Y. The categories made me think that the thing we call love should work from the head down, when in my case it was working from the crotch up. Yes, I was in love with a vagina, a vulva, even a uterus, but it didn't mean 1 couldn't love a mind, nor did it mean that I should, though in all likelihood 1 would. The memory of the salty smell of her pussy would be the inspiration that'd make her the Gretchen of my latter-day Faust tale. We had transcended our selves through the ecstasy of our great fucks, but we would also experience a spiritual transcendence in which we'd rediscover them. Inevitably, we would find the true essence of each other's beings.
I got a cab and headed back to the hotel. The cab driver, an elderly black man, had one of those beaten up '60s radios, where you pushed the black buttons to get the station. 1 hadn't heard such muted music since I was a teenager, and the contrast was all the more dramatic since he was tuned into the local hip-hop station, which plainly required a more contemporary form of amplification. 1 looked over at the odometer and 1 saw the car had more than 500,000 miles on it. That cab had been to the equivalent of the moon and back. It was a black Ford Fairlane whose chrome had rusted off. The hip-hop version of "1 Got a Woman" was playing and it made me want to cry. 1 was hot, my legs itched, and I missed her two hair-covered lips more than I had ever missed anything before. It was as if those lips were talking to me and saying I want to end the relationship, a projection that only increased the excitement that was building inside of me.