Lover Come Home Ch. 02

Letter 2

Monday, warmer

Dearest V

You always say I am a passionate woman, but what good does that do me now? I am beached, out of water, out of air, out of everything that gives me reason. No idea, of course, when you will return, so I lie here wishing the soft hairs on your thigh were distracting me from my reading in bed. I can read Faulkner with total concentration. Then I'll move on to Joyce and Proust, the others I've always said I wanted to read but never have. Your leaving me will advance my literary understanding and appreciation. Passion on a page instead of in my bed is no substitute. Let the words rage and pant. I want life.

Passion is a curse if you are alone. It must have a direction. I look for you in the smells of your towel, the sheets, your dirty clothes. Like every lovesick teenager I wear your discarded shirt to bed. It isn't enough. I want you.

I think of our happier moments. Remember the time we made love in the master bedroom of a model house? It was in an outlying suburb. We had stopped to gawk. We wanted to know how other people wanted to live. One door in the odd, too new house was closed. We opened it to see what secrets it held. None of the other gawkers seemed to take any interest in this mystery. What we saw was a red velvet bedspread on a bed big enough to contain all the King's Army and all the King's Men. Too good to pass up. While the possible buyers of this baroque bedroom wandered past its door, too decorous or bored to wonder why it was closed, we beat the world land speed record for pants down and penis up. We laughed longer than we made love. But the red velvet was well christened. Making love can be funny even here in our not so big bed. Our bodies stick, our noses get in the way . Or sometimes are put away. Yours in my vagina, inhaling deeply, is another fond memory. My legs are up in the air, over my head, you are grunting like a dinosaur. Your hands are gripping my breasts like they are a lifeline to shore. Perhaps they are.

Or, I am on my hands and knees, and swaying wildly, you are doing the impossible by trying to be both in back of me and all around me at the same time. How fortunate that I am agile and you are not given to discouragement. These are not elegant postures or moments. Only in books on Indian art do the contortions of dedicated, insistent love makers seem serene and beautiful. When we do it, our bodies are heaving, our hair is flying, our sounds are crazed.

Only your face is beautiful, just before you come. Its entire contour changes. The contours soften, there are no bones, only baby flesh, untroubled. With your eyes closed you look for an instant like the Ceylonese Buddhas hidden in the basement of the art museum. I go to visit them sometimes in the afternoon, to smile secretly back at them. Both of us are enlightened by our secret knowledge.

When you return I will kneel before you on the floor. With your penis in my mouth I will stroke and stroke and stroke. My tongue will keep up a rhythm that slowly builds. My lips will bend around the head, and gently pull and pound. I will look up to gaze into your eyes, to see them change. First glazed, looking only inward, into your own pleasure, then they clear when they see me watching. Our pleasure, what we make together, is deeper, but it demands that you yield your gaze into mine. Our eyes cannot touch but they can meet and join in a bond as deep as any penetration. You bend over to touch my face, and look more closely into me. My mouth still works but slower, more intensely. You do not need or want a great deal of movement now. You are hovering. We are together in that place where only we exist. Where we breathe the same air with one set of lungs, pump oxygen through our veins with only one heart, and feel the expanding energy in one set of cells.

When you are ready (but not quite willing) to leave our one body, I will touch your chest with one hand. This will bring you back slightly to the world of chairs and beds and bodies. With my other hand I will raise my small hand mirror to your face. Then you too can see what your true self looks like. The face of a Ceylonese Buddha, who sees a world where we are one and chairs and beds do not exist. Seeing your face when we make love is all that I need to know.

After you have seen your face, you can fill me once again. Your milky sweet slime in my mouth reminds me of my first oyster, frightening and wonderful. Then the endless time, present only when we gaze into each other's eyes, ends.

C