Any Woman's Blues Read Free Page A

swim through ice. He’d hack the jungle with his bare hands, bite the heads off poisonous snakes, strip the skin from armadillos or porcupines. In short, he is my man, and I am addicted to the nectar he brews in his balls.
    Since he cannot be good, it would be easier if he were entirely bad so at least I could hate him. But how can I hate him when the very badness in him makes him so very good where it counts—in bed?
    He arrives, helmeted like Darth Vader, wearing black leather jeans and black leather jacket and black ostrich-leather boots with needle toes. Real spurs are on his heels. Silver spurs. They twinkle. He scoops me in his arms, holds me for a moment, my warm body against the wind-chilled smoothness of his black leather. From the moment I hear the spray of pebbles on the driveway and the racing motor of his bike, my motor begins to race as well. The pounding begins in my heart, spreads through my body like a jungle tattoo, sets up a resounding echo in that other heart between my thighs, eventually moistening the red silk knickers I have worn for this occasion. (They really are knickers and not their meeker American cousin, “panties,” for I have bought them in London, where the “dirty weekend” is still good and dirty, and the accoutrements produced for same are, accordingly, more risqué.)
    Who can describe lust when it is this hot, this succulent, this compelling? Words cannot touch it. Perhaps only music can echo the swell and heft of it, the heat, the vibration. I once painted a picture of lust (all right: the secret is out: you know what I do). It was a round canvas with a burning center of orange and waves of red and lavender vibrating toward it. (That was in my so-called abstract period, which followed my so-called figurative period and preceded my so-called postmodernist film-still period.) These waves of red and lavender—a futurist contusion—are with me now, inside me, as he runs his hands down my buttocks, slides between my thighs, and finds the silky place where the red knickers part and I become pure liquid.
    What happens next you know. I almost know it too, except that I am out of my mind with desire. We fall to the floor of the foyer (wide oaken planks, a hooked rug, a few dustballs chasing each other around as if they were tumbleweeds in the wake of our stampeding horses), and right there on the floorboards we make the beast with two backs in a tangle of black leather and silk, our clothes pulled away only enough to expose the parts that have the power to join.
    Like this—dressed, helmeted, leathered by the goat under whose sign we couple—we come the first tumultuous time. It only seems to heat our blood for the next, and now we begin to strip off barriers of silk and skin and metal (my knickers, his black leather, his helmet), so that soon we are naked on the wide planks of the seventeenth-century floor, with a chaos of clothes flung about us everywhere—our witnesses.
    “My witch,” he whispers.
    “My devil, my warlock, my love . . .”
    He is inside me again, hard again, the curved shaft of his cock corresponding to the bent desire that drives me, the tip of his glans hitting the spot deep within me that squirts pure liquid, the witches’ potion of the universe.
    Shall I go on? How can two make love like this, then part? They should be joined forever, made one under the mocking moon that illuminates their bluish bodies, sky-clad. But it is one of the ironies of this sort of sex that it thrives on distance, and lovers who love like this either cannot live together, or when they do, then some magic goes out of their coupling; only that way can they live together long enough to make porridge, paint a house, plant a garden—or a baby.
     
     
    We lived together once, Darth and I. (His real name is not far off: Darton—named for some distant family warlock of the past.) I never called him that. I called him Dart: it seemed so appropriate, since he lived in his cock and also was