Any Woman's Blues_ A Novel of Obsession - Erica Jong [114]
We speak rudimentary troglodyte English and rudimentary troglodyte Italian.
“Tu sei diavolo,” I say. A devil is what you are.
“You like that,” he says. “Only a devil could capture you. An amazon needs a centaur to carry her off.”
And then words fail us and we communicate with our fingertips, with our tongues, with the brush of our toes on the surface of our skins. Outside, inside, sun, moon, have no meaning, and we are rocking in the boat of each other, in the lagoon of dreams, at once liquid and starry, watery yet made of shimmering light.
“Mio troglodita,” I say.
“Pelle di luce, pelle liquida di stelle, occhi di luna,” he says.
“Siamo animali,” I say.
“Anima, animali,” he replies.
He lounges in the boat, smelling of sex, of primal ooze, the tip of his cock crying for me.
We kiss, bite, tangle.
“Which animal are you?” he asks.
“Sono cane, fedele,” I say, knowing I am really more cat than dog.
“Non è vero,” he says. “Tu sei gattina. I see your claws even though you try to hide them.”
I am stung by this. Is it true? Or just a lovers’ game?
“E tu?”
“I’m a fox, a clever fox,” he says.
(My friend Emmie always says: “Listen to what they say at the start of a love affair; they are telling you how it will end.”)
“Now sleep,” he says, leaning me back in the boat, opening the snaps of my lace bodysuit, and beginning to fuck me very slowly at various angles. Both of us are half reclining, and tears are streaming down my cheeks. He is fucking me as if he wants to enter every part of me, discovering America.
I cannot stop crying and crying out, and as I start to come, he cries, “Dai, dai, dai” (come on, come on, come on) and “Apri, apri” (open up, open up).
He stops and moves, moves and stops, moves again—until I come, completely full of him, entered, eternal, and he comes with me, filling me with salty stars.
I am still crying, but as I return to myself I see him watching me, reserved, from a distance.
“What do you want from me?” I ask.
“Il sesso,” he says. Sex. “And another set of twins. If the twins arrive, I will be monogamo.”
Ah, promises, promises. This man will not ever be monogamo, any more than Julian will ever fuck me. But my judgment is lost, for here, in The Land of Fuck, there is no such thing as judgment.
“Can we be fifty-fifty?” he asks, “even though you are an Amazon? Or forty-nine-fifty-one?”
We have gone from sex to power, made that inevitable leap.
I lie with my head in his lap. The sky darkens. Stars appear.
“You have such a marvelous body,” he says. “You relax completely. The first time almost, the second time better, and this time completely.”
And I think that so much of sex is about this, about the man wanting to totally enter the woman, invade her and make her his. Without this need for mastery, possession, there is no animal sex. There are intellectual games about sleeping in boxes. There are verbal jokes about “shoe business.” But without this animal entering, sex doesn’t work, and only when sex works like this can you enter The Land of Fuck.
Is it all about cocks, finally, and whether or not they work? Is it all about their size? Women say no, no, no, having been taught their lessons well by men who fear their cocks are too small. Men say no, meaning yes, for all their behavior tells you that what they really care about is how their cocks work. Thom, Elmore, Dart, Danny, Lionel, Renzo, Julian—I have never met a man whose life wasn’t run by the size and stiffness of his cock.
This is the one thing women never dare say. This is the one thing we resolutely lie about. And why? Because it is all too true. The size and stiffness of a man’s cock determines his life. It determines how he feels about himself. It determines whether he likes himself. A man who likes his cock