Now my desire to know was overcoming my fear. If there were only some way I could call her. Intelligence services had all kinds of methods of identifying people. She didn't need me to be a hot pussy. Her pussy was independently hot, which meant she'd undoubtedly had plenty of guys before me. I've known many women married to someone who provides stability and what, for a hot woman, is essentially Platonic love. These kinds of women fuck their husbands once a week for the sake of appearance and satisfy their real sexuality elsewhere. She had to have left a trail of previous lovers, who were undoubtedly already occupying the empty space in her bed (a thought that added jealousy to my already overwrought condition). She was a member of the sexual aristocracy-a group of men and women with inordinate sexual needs and the kind of superhuman physiological capacities necessary to satisfy them. The government must be keeping track of them to make sure they never went to work for the CIA. You put a highly sexualized person in a sensitive security situation, and you run the risk of leaks. I called information and asked for the number of the CIA campus, but when the automated operator said, Vetilpn i's non) connectingyour call to, I hung up.
There was only one other solution-hypnosis. If I couldn't find her once I was back home, I could go back in my memory to our first fuck; I could figure out when and where we met, and from there I'd be able to figure out how 1 knew her. One thing would lead to the next. A butcher, a baker-any local storekeeper might provide the clue. All I needed was one person who knew her and understood my problem-someone who could lean over the counter and whisper to her, "There's somebody desperately trying to get in touch with you."
Did she have a picture of me in her mind, or was I only a dick, just as she was a cunt? Did she have as little idea of my face as I had of hers? Finding the face to match the cunt I was looking for would be like finding a needle in a haystack. I kept thinking my life is over. My erection kept coming back. My longing for her cunt would eventually kill me. I could see my obit in the paper: died of complications from priapism. A sustained erection can do to the penis what diabetes does to the extremities-render it painful, useless, and in need of amputation.
The thing 1 feared most was in danger of coming true. I'd always been afraid of retribution. Pleasure wouldn't go unpunished. When 1'd set out to invent my new self, to create a macho personality, 1'd read a hundred self-help books that told me it was neurotic to worry. I'd finally caved in to all the analysts, therapists, healers, and assorted gurus who argued there was nothing to be afraid of. Now it turned out I'd been right in the first place. The best place for my dick was squished up against my balls like a fig; letting it hang out, sticking it out proudly in the world, would result in little more than it getting lopped off.
I left a note for Bill and his friend, Sam, and took off for the airport, even though it meant I was going to have to pay my own way. I made a list for Bill. When he got back, I wanted to try the meatloaf and mashed potatoes he was always bragging about. Bill dabbled in such styles as cuisine classique and cuisine minceur since he couldn't stand repeating the same specialties all the time, but he basically believed in classic American dishes like meatloaf, apple pie, mashed potatoes, corn fritters, and fried chicken. He was a deconstructionist as far as food was concerned because, as he explained, "Nothing dramatizes as much as food, how culture-bound our assumptions are." It might be hard to argue that some neighborhood rapper was as great as Shakespeare, but when it came to food, who was 1 to say that coquilles St. Jacques or lobster thermidor were superior to a cheese burger? However, I could say without a doubt that our lovemaking was superior to anything that I or perhaps anyone on earth had ever experienced, and that her pussy was one of the finest sexual specimens in the world.
I was suffering from the blindness of passion. The emotion I felt towards her was so powerful I couldn't even remember who she was. Yet like the blind man who compensates for his condition with increasing acuity in his other sensory faculties, I had built up a sixth sense in so far as the inside of her vagina was concerned. No matter how wet and hot another woman's cunt was, no matter how powerfully a woman was able to draw my prick in with her vaginal muscle, there was no way I could be fooled. I would have known her cunt anywhere. If 1 suffered a form of agnosia in which I couldn't recognize the face of the person for whom I felt sexual passion, I had made up for it with an archeologist-level appreciation for the walls of the cunt. My prick had scoured the crevices, the surfaces, it had plummeted, it had rolled, it had inspected, it had unleashed, it had crawled, it had plowed, it had prodded. No gynecologist examining her in stirrups contained my knowledge, because in the end it wasn't only a knowledge of hair follicles, skin, veins, muscles, emissions, viscosity, temperature (after all she wasn't an engine whose exhaust was being examined for an annual motor vehicle inspection), it was all these physical things rolled up into a ball. Porn movies give the impression that sex is simply a matter of equipment. To extend the automotive metaphor, it's as if sex were simply a matter of finding the right driver for the car, the right saddle or jockey for the horse. But she and I were more than a stiff prick and a lubricious cunt (though these phenomenological elements didn't hurt). The powerful emotions that derived from our sexual congress, the elements that in fact optimized the effectiveness of my cock and her pussy, were composed of the ineffable mixture of unconscious desires and affects that create the mystery of attraction, the fuel for the engine, as it were-even when only the genitals were involved.
More than once on the way to the airport I told the cab driver, a longhaired kid who kept playing Bob Dylan's "Lay Lady Lay" over and over again on his CD player, to hit the brakes. I kept thinking I was seeing her, even though I couldn't activate the memory chip that would have given away the secret of her identity. I still didn't know what the hell she looked like. I felt like one of those Kennedy assassination freaks who play and replay the Zabruder film (1963), trying to discover something that wasn't there. The fact is when you don't know who someone is, almost anyone can be them, and in fact just about anyone who remotely fills the bill becomes a candidate. I screamed so loudly for the cab driver to stop at one point that he stopped short, causing the car in back of us to hit our fender. I didn't have time for insurance companies and the police and immediately offered each of the offended parties S50 bills. The last time I screamed out, I told the cab driver to pull over. I was sure it was her. My candidate turned out to be a twenty-one-year-old Hispanic hooker named Hilda, who when I asked, "Are you her?" offered to be anything I wanted her to be and change into any outfit I wanted so that she could be it, at the price of 5100 for a halfhour session or enough drugs to satisfy her "crank" habit. That's Key West for you; in that kind of heat, women don't think twice about taking off their clothes.
Hilda and I walked from Ocean Avenue to the infamous Duval Street, where the mixture of working girls, guys, and chicken hawks reminded me of the Tenderloin in San Francisco. She wasn't wearing panties, so when she pulled up her dress, I was able to see she wasn't my passion; she shaved. A lot of your common street hookers these days are either graduates of creative writing programs in top universities who regard prostitution as research for the novel, play, or collection of short stories they're working on, or they're addicts. Hilda was actually a combination of both. There's been a rash of this lifeand-art confusion with Ivy League-educated girls becoming wrestlers, garbage collectors, and in one case even a professional boxer who ended up with an 8–9 record before selling her first novel, Rubber Gloves. During the course of trying to entice me by playing with her clit, Hilda started discussing Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet with me. We'd both read it as high school students in the original Schocken edition and had both taken great solace in the cover design. Since we had established a good rapport, I asked her if she would mind if I stuck my finger in her pussy just to confirm she wasn't my lost love. 1 even offered to pay extra, but she wouldn't hear of it. My finger slid right in, and I have to say there were some striking similarities, especially with regard to the topography of the inner walls. I hadn't reached my destination, but I was on the right track!