Saline Solution Read Free

She had four orgasms.
    And when I got physically tired, and bored with the cycles of excitement and detachment, I had her kneel again as though she were in church praying, and then prostrate herself fully forward from the waist, her spine bent, her belly hanging, her cunt at an angle for deepest penetration, and I let myself spin off into an unobstructed movement, my pelvis shuddering rapidly as I let the energy ripple freely through my body, enjoying the crashing pleasure of the way her cunt caught my cock and held it as I slid in and out of her, and the pose of abject submission she took before me, and I let the sperm bubble through and flush out into her as I yelled in release, a hairy solipsist in the throes of a loveless orgasm.
    Gradually she let herself sink full-length on the bed, and I lay on top of her. We were in exactly the same position we had held before we started to fuck. It made everything that had happened in between seem futile. But that also seemed true of life. In all of the times we had had sex, I had never let go in her arms. I always performed, not in the adolescent sense of trying to be the best fuck she ever had, but in the more insidious way of never losing my selfconsciousness. Both in and out of bed I kept my distance, and we shared no existential rushes.
    Secretly we both played the game of pretending that each of us had the power to save the other from dying.
    I suddenly became very aware of the body lying underneath me, of this human being now thinking her thoughts as I was thinking mine, perhaps as aware as I of the gap between us, and wondered whether there were such a thing as love which could erase the essential strangeness of the other. I could imagine myself after forty years looking into Lucinda's eyes and saying, 'I never did know who you were, really.' But of course, that would be no more than I would say to myself. Freud was wrong. The opposite of Eros is not Thanatos, but Absurdity.
    We got up and moved randomly around the apartment, and I drifted into the kitchen to make tea, finding a therapeutic calmness in the orderliness of the ritual. 'Let's bring the radio in to the city next time,' Lucinda said.
    We had taken all our electronic props to Fire Island, and when we came into the city for a few days we felt like junkies whose supply had been cut off. The thoroughness with which the noise made by the media had permeated our sense of environment was chilling. Once, when Lucinda was bitching about not having the stereo in the city, I launched into a long rap on the value of returning to one's inner resources and she shot back, ' What inner resources?'
    I sipped the tea and looked out the window to the apartment building across the alley. The woman who was lying in bed, whatever time we looked, was still there, still wearing a slip. 'She's still there,' I said. 'I envy her.' Lucinda said, 'She doesn't need anything but sleep.'
    'Why don't you call Francis and Bertha?' I said. 'Find out what time we should pick them up on Sunday.'
    'What about that Ireland thing?' she said.
    'It's just a whim.'
    'He seemed so serious about it.'
    'I've known Francis for nine years,' I said. 'He's had hundreds of enthusiasms. They're always brilliant ideas, and he is always carried away by them. And they burst within a few days, leaving anyone who changed any plans on his account a little discomfited.'
    We were going to take them with us to the Island for the rest of the season. Bertha was his new girl of several months' standing, and the four of us had spent an evening together smoking dope and tripping out on travel and politics.
    'Ireland's a beautiful place,' Francis had said. 'And with no history of imperialism. They're as fucked up as anybody else as people, but they've got a pretty clean national conscience.'
    Lucinda got very excited. 'Yes,' she had said, 'let's get out of the country.' I knew she was thinking about the baby.
    I came away from the window, and lit a cigarette. 'I don't think