I unfastened the timer too, separating myself from it for the first time in my career up the line. Waves of real terror burst over me. I felt more naked than naked, without it; I felt stripped down to my bones. Without my timer around my hips I was the slave of time, like all these others. I had no means of quick escape. If Pulcheria planned some cruel joke and I was caught without my timer in easy reach, I was doomed.
Hastily I put the timer back on.
Then I washed myself, meticulously, everywhere, cleansing myself for Pulcheria. And stood naked beside the bed, waiting another billion years. And thought longingly of the dark swollen tips of Pulcheria’s full breasts, and the softness of the skin inside her thighs. And my manhood came to life, rising to such extravagant proportions that I was both proud and embarrassed.
I didn’t want Pulcheria to walk in and find me like this, beside the bed with this tree of flesh sprouting between my legs. I looked like a tipped tripod; to greet her this way was too blunt, too direct. Quickly I dressed again, feeling foolish. And waited a billion years more. And saw dawnlight beginning to blend with moonlight in my slit of a window.
And the door opened, and Pulcheria came into the room, and bolted the door behind her.
She had wiped away her heavy makeup and had taken off all her jewelry except a single gold pectoral, and she had changed from her party clothes into a light silken wrap. Even by the dim light I saw she was nude beneath it, and the soft curves of her body inflamed me almost to insanity. She glided toward me.
I took her in my arms and tried to kiss her. She didn’t understand kissing. The posture one must adopt for mouth-to-mouth contact was alien to her. I had to arrange her. I tilted her head gently. She smiled, puzzled but willing.
Our lips touched. My tongue wiggled forth.
She quivered and flattened her body tight against mine. She picked up the theory of kissing in a hurry.
My hands slid down her shoulders. I drew off her wrap; she trembled a little as I bared her.
I counted her breasts. Two. Rosy pink nipples. I measured her hind cheeks with my outspread hands. A good size. I ran fingertips over her thighs. Excellent thighs. I admired the two deep dimples in the small of her back.
She was at once shy and wanton, a superb combination.
When I undressed, she saw the timer and touched it, plucked at it, but asked for no explanation, and her hands slipped lower. We tumbled down together on the bed.
You know, sex is really a ridiculous thing. The physical act of it, I mean. What they call “making love” in twentieth-century novels; what they call “sleeping together.” I mean, consider all the literary effort that has gone into writing rhapsodies to screwing. And what does it all amount to, anyway?
You take this short rigid fleshy rod and you put it into this lubricated groove, and you rub it back and forth until enough of a charge is built up so that discharge is possible. Like making a fire by twirling a stick against a plank. Really, there’s nothing to it; Stick Tenon A into Mortise B. Vibrate until finished.
Look upon the act and you know it’s preposterous. The buttocks humping up and down, the thrashing legs, the muffled groans, the speedings up and slowing down — can anything be sillier, as a central act governing human emotions?
Of course not. Yet why was this sweaty transaction with Pulcheria so important to me? (And maybe to her.)
My theory is that the real significance of sex, good sex, is a symbolic one. It’s something beyond the fact that you get a tickle of “pleasure” for a short while during the ramming and butting. The same pleasure is available without the bother of finding a partner, after all, and yet it isn’t the same, is it?
No, what sex is about is more than a twitch in the loins; it’s a celebration of spiritual union, of mutual trust. We say to each other in bed, here, I give myself to you in the expectation that you’ll give me pleasure, and I will attempt to give you pleasure too. The social contract, let’s call it. And the thrill lies in the contract, not in the pleasure that is its payoff.
Also you say, here is my naked body with all its flaws, which I expose trustingly to you, knowing you will not mock it. Also you say, I accept this intimate contact with you even though I know you may transmit to me a loath-some disease. I am willing to take this risk, because you are you. And also the woman used to say — at least up until the nineteenth or early twentieth century — I will open myself to you even though there may be all sorts of biological consequences nine months from now.
All these things are much more vital than quick kickies. This is why mechanical masturbating devices have never replaced sex and never will.
This is why what happened between myself and Pulcheria Ducas on that Byzantine morning in 1105 was far more significant a transaction than what happened between myself and the Empress Theodora half a millennium earlier, and more significant than what had happened between myself and any number of girls a full millennium later. Into Theodora, into Pulcheria, and into those many girls down the line I poured roughly the same number of cubic centimeters of salty fluid; but with Pulcheria it was different. With Pulcheria, our orgasm was only the symbolic sealing of something greater. For me, Pulcheria was the embodiment of beauty and grace, and her easy surrender to me made me an emperor more mighty than Alexius, and neither the spurting of my jet nor her quiver of response mattered a tenth as much as the fact that she and I had come together in trust, in faith, in shared desire, in — love. There you have the heart of my philosophy. I stand revealed as a naked romantic. This is the profundity I’ve distilled from all my experience: sex with love is better than sex without love. Q.E.D. I can also show, if you like, that to be healthy is better than to be ill, and that having money is superior to being poor. My capacity for abstract thought is limitless.
48.
Nevertheless, even though we had proven the philosophical point quite adequately, we went on to prove it all over again half an hour later. Redundancy is the soul of understanding.
Afterward we lay side by side, glowing sweetly. It was the moment to offer my partner a weed and share a different sort of communion, but of course that was impossible here. I felt the lack.
“Is it very different where you come from?” Pulcheria asked. “I mean, the people, how they dress, how they talk.”
“Very different.”
“I sense a great strangeness about you, George. Even the way you held me in bed. Not that I am an expert on such things, you must understand. You and Leo are the only men I have ever had.”
“Can this be true?”
Her eyes blazed. “You take me for a whore?”
“Well, of course not, but—” I floundered. “In my country,” I said desperately, “a girl takes many men before she marries. No one objects to it. It’s the custom.”
“Not here. We are well sheltered. I was married at twelve; that gave me little time for liberties.” She frowned, sat up, leaned across me to look in my eyes. Her breasts dangled enticingly over my face. “Are women really so loose in your country?”
“Truth, Pulcheria, they are.”
“But you are Byzantines! You are not barbarians from the north! How can it be allowed, this taking of so many men?”
“It’s our custom.” Lamely.
“Perhaps you are not truly from Epirus,” she suggested. “Perhaps you come from some more distant place. I tell you again, you are very strange to me, George.”