Or wishful thinking…

I found, came upon really, a wonderful triangle at the small of her back, maybe half the size of my palm. Already she’d had two or three orgasms — I’d been at it nearly an hour. Working entirely with my hands and lips, with a gathering unhurried fervency, no penetration. Driven only by her sensory output, her natural fragrance, her textures, and visuals. A soft mmmm occasionally. She was tranquil, permitting, enjoying, half-sleepy. I think a drug of some sort was beginning its effect. She took it, a prescription, religiously, a few hours before bed. Every night no matter what. Some psychiatrist’s conception of a safe bet to stave off the demons in her waning decades, a kind of wary truce between a crummy compromised sleep and overt anxiety-filled battles with the subconscious residue of her living past. But I knew it was bogus therapy. A scientific half-lie. She told me in an eerie phone call some months back that she always had bad nights. Far back as she could remember. But those earlier times with me — her sleep was peaceful. She felt safe, she told me. Half present. A memory strangely distinct in a churning sea of blurry chaos. In her voice the dazed honesty of someone who’d been through something terrible. I knew it was without pretense. Well — we should try it again… we should sleep together. See if it works. The idea spoke itself out of me without guile, before I could think. Like a lab discussion. And I could hear the assent in her silence. And knew she would eventually visit.

Omar Sharif was once asked by an interviewer what made a woman a good lover. Being cosmopolitan ahead of his time, the actor took it seriously and reflected, as though conversing with his deeper self. A woman must be curious about my body, he said. She must be interested and want to explore it with intelligence, upholding a sensitivity to how what she does links to my emotions. I think we were in a reversed Omar Sharif situation. The curious thing about her triangle was how I had a deep experience of recognition when I touched it. I had to linger, a long while, learning it’s shape and firmness. It had been thirty years. But just now, in this extended moment, I loved exactly what I loved then. I felt the contours of her triangle’s boundary, how it transitioned into the softer fat layers and muscle beyond, which her biography had since deposited there. Both were good, warm, but the triangle was a time machine. To press on it was to love her in her twenties again, and to re-perceive how her irresistible physicality propelled us beyond reason or calculation or self-awareness, into: immediacy. We could never maintain consciousness afterwards. Falling into a bout of utter dreamless contented sleep, even if it was midday, if only for five minutes. And then always, always, rousing and coming back together, simultaneously, one another’s bosom being the first thing our eyes could see.

She was a time-being! Now I knew. I knew before of course, but only intellectually, in the abstract. Her past was there and so was her present. All in this now, intermingled. Likely her potential futures too. But to know this, in experience, meant something vaster still. In loving her body, and her voice, I had crossed briefly over to something not usually present. Or rather present but beyond the normal capacity to grasp. Grace placed me in the company of that part of her which endures. Her triangle was as the gods arranged things. Of a perfect design, unblemished as yet by the vicissitudes of a lifetime of desires. It nestled, surrounded, within the soft firmness of her accumulated choices and deeds and passions and passivities, a product not of the gods but the human dwelling within. A cosmic eroticism characterizes this union. Loving her body was a portal. To loving something closer to her spirit.

_______RS

[ Image : Detail snippet from a charcoal drawing, “The Couple”, available at Saatchi Art. ] (link)

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