These two want to wonder and wander and squander each other, they have plenty of themselves in store and all the latest catalogues of erotica at home. Just think of those who don’t need the expensive extras, who hold each other dear without the sundries! Their special offers are themselves. They flood their banks and dykes, they won’t be dammed or damned, they go with the flow of experience, the tide takes them where it will. Suddenly Gerti has an irresistible urge to piss, which she does, first hesitantly, then full force. The vapour fills the confined space. She wraps the dressing-gown about her thighs and it gets wet. Michael playfully cups his hands and catches some of the audible jet, laughing he washes his face and body, then thumps Gerti onto her back and chews at her dripping labia, sucking and wringing out the rags. Then he drags Gerti into her own puddle and splashes her in it. She rolls her eyes upward but there’s no lightbulb up there, just the darkness inside her grinning skull. This is a feast. We’re on our own, talking to our sex: our dearest of guests, though one who is forever wanting the choicest titbits. The dressing-gown, which the woman has pulled back on again, is torn off her once more, and she beds down deep in the hay. On the floorboards there’s a wet patch. As if some superior being no one saw coming had made it. The only light is moonlight. Illuminating the present. Expecting a present in return.
The pallid bags of her breasts sag on her ribcage. Only one man and one child have ever made use of them. The Man back home ever bakes his impetuous daily bread anew. If your breasts hang right down on the table at dinner you can get an operation. They were made for the child and for the Man and for the child in the Man. Their owner is still writhing in her excreted fluid. Her bones and hinges are rattling with cold. Michael, racing down the slope, chomps at her privates and clutches and tugs at her dugs. Any moment now his God-given sap will rise in his stem, his cup will overflow. Hurry up, stuff that prick in its designated slot, no loitering. You can hear her shrieks, you can see the whites of her eyes, what are you waiting for?
The young man is suddenly alarmed at the totality with which he can spend himself without being spent. Again and again he reappears from within the woman, only to bury his little bird in the box again. He’s now licked Gerti from top to toe. His tongue’s still tart with the taste of her piss. Next her face. The woman snaps at him and bites. It hurts, but it’s a language animals understand. He grabs her head, still by the hair, pulls it up off the floor and slams it back where he first found it. Gerti splays her mouth wide open and Michael’s penis gives it a thorough go. Her eyes are shut. He jabs his knees in, forcing the woman to spread her thighs again. The novelty of this has worn off, unfortunately, since he did it the same way last time. So there you are, all skin and flick, and your desire is always the same old film! An endless chain of repetitions, less appealing every time because the electronic media and melodies have accustomed us to having something new home-delivered every day. Michael spreads Gerti wide as if he wanted to nail her to a cross and were not presently going to hang her in the wardrobe with the other clothes he rarely wears, which is what he’d actually intended. He stares at her cleft. This is familiar territory now. When she looks away, because she cannot bear his scrutiny and the groping, pinching hands that examine her, he hits her. He wants to see and do everything. He has a right to. There are details you can’t see, and, in the event of there being a next time, a flashlight would come in handy. Before going in out of the night to the bodywork repairs shop. This woman had best learn to take the lordand-master’s examination of her sex. And not hang her feelings on his peg. For thereby hangs a tale.
Hay cascades over her, warming her slightly. The master is finished. The woman’s wound is throbbing and swollen. Retracting his instrument abruptly, Michael signals that he wants to retire to the tidy quarters of his own body. Already he has become a platform for this woman, from which she will speak on the subject of her longing and his long thing. Thus, without so much as being photographed in underwear and framed, one can become the centre-piece of a well-appointed room. This young man created the white and awe-inspiring mountains of flesh before him. Like the evening sun, he has touched that face with red. He has taken a lease on the woman, and as far as she’s concerned he can now grope under her dress whenever he likes.
Gerti covers Michael with soft and downy kisses. Soon she will return to her house and her lord and master, who has qualities of his own. For we always wish to return to the place of our old wounds and tear open the gift wrapping in which we have disguised the old as the new, to conceal it. And our declining star teaches us nothing at all.
UNTITLED by Paul Mayersberg
GREG AWOKE TO the fact that he was going nowhere. He didn’t think of himself as an imprecise man, but by his thirty-fifth birthday he was still without a defined career in the movies. He had had a long sequence of odd jobs: as a floor runner, assistant location manager, unit driver. He had no flat to call his own. He stayed with friends, rented when he could afford it, house sat, squatted.
His relationship with women had proved equally short-lived and imprecise. Greg had not found what he wanted in a woman. When he examined the long sequence of girls he had had he could not find a common denominator. Not in age or appearance or lifestyle. With women, like work, he took what he could get. Nothing lasted. There was no pattern to any of it. Sexually he was without direction.
Greg was naturally an optimistic man but now he gave in to depression. He found himself in a flat without a television and where the phone had been cut off. His dole cheque had stopped since he had been out of work for six months. For cash work, he went from door to door in good neighborhoods, knocking on doors, offering to wash cars parked in the street. His only evening solace was masturbation.
Looking for stimulation he rummaged through the two-room flat for books with sexy passages, old fashion magazines, women’s clothes catalogues. Underwear, swimwear, skin beauty products. The place, left empty for the summer by an acquaintance of an acquaintance, had obviously been occupied by one or two women. Among the magazines, books, junk mail and bills Greg found a typed manuscript, a screenplay.
The front page read UNTITLED. There was no author’s name but there was a date. The work was four years old. Greg started to read. It brought him back to his imagined career in films. “Untitled” was an erotic story in the style popular a few years back.
Two working girls, sharing a flat with one bedroom, took it in turns to bring their boyfriends home for the night. One night, one of the boyfriends came out of the bedroom at three in the morning and climbed into the sofa bed in the sitting room to set about seducing the other girl, while her friend was asleep.
To begin with it looked like a story of betrayal, but then it turned out that the girls had pre-arranged it. They had embarked on a programme of sharing their men. But without telling them. The next day the girls compared notes on the sexual performance of the boyfriends.
Greg read the script right through at a sitting. It was clear to him that one or other or both the girls had written it as an account of their own experience in this flat. The sofa he was now sitting on as he read it was the sofa-bed referred to on page 18 where Rick first put his hand inside Annie’s pajama top. Annie had protested to begin with but not too vehemently. She enjoyed his attentions. She let him take off her pajama trousers. She allowed him to touch and kiss any part of her. But wouldn’t let him enter her. That, she told him, would be too much. After all, he was Kate’s boyfriend and Kate was her friend.