The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore - Benjamin Hale [91]
At first these incidents were hazy fever dreams of sex more than the thing itself: both of us half-asleep and lazy-blooded, moving slowly and silently, enjoying the interplay of skin and tongues and fingers and membranes and fluids and the sensitive, primitive organs of pleasure that we both possessed. Lying beside her in bed, I would gently prod her shoulder with a long purple finger, asking if she was awake. Sometimes she would murmur something in response, which did not necessarily mean yes. Sometimes an erection would slink out of my loins on its own accord, and sometimes I would hintingly nudge it toward her, and sometimes she would feel it—it would brush against her thigh or her haunches or her belly—and then sometimes she would take a commanding grasp of it, and after this decisive moment I suddenly and drunkenly cared for nothing in the world but the white heat of our mutual and imminent ecstasies. And then our sex was like a viscous liquid, sweet and slow as honey drooling from a spoon. And then we would wake in the morning vaguely wondering if we had really done what we had done, as if perhaps it had been only one movement of a half-remembered, and shared, symphony of dreams.
Later, we would be more upfront about things. More conscious, more deliberate. Soon Lydia and I were secretly living in sin. Like Anna and Vronsky. Reflecting back on that time, that period when we were living happily together in our apartment in Hyde Park—the stretch of months after we had become physically intimate, but before the project collapsed in a ruin of debt and doubt—was one of the happiest times in my life.
The arrangement was not without its problematic aspects. Perhaps the friendship between me and Lydia on the one hand had been deepened and solidified by the bond of our total physical intimacy—and on the other hand threatened by it, due to the host of complicated and often conflicting feelings that this free license of bodily contact introduces between two people in love. Also there was the emotional awkwardness of the fact that for obvious reasons, our sexual relationship had to be kept absolutely secret at the lab. Lydia was terrified of exposure. It was heartbreaking to me that every day at the lab we still had to pretend that the relationship between us was still businesslike, still scientific, still chaste—that we were not utterly in love.
There are no animals on this planet, at least not that I’m aware of, so squeamish about touching one another as humans. Go to a zoo and watch the chimpanzees. You’ll probably see them all tangled together in one big cuddly heap. They feel most comfortable that way, most safe. Humans, though, make much talk of “respecting personal space,” and behave toward one another as if their bodies are hostile nations buffered by hazardous frontiers of no-man’s-land, traveling radii of airspace surrounding every body, into which another’s ingress may be considered an unauthorized invasion, even when the intent is peaceable. This fierce physical mistrust goes away—goes away completely—only among lovers. Lydia and I had developed that total physical comfort with one another that comes with sexual intimacy—when we were alone together at home, our bodies were free to touch and be touched by each other, to give one another pleasure—but at the lab, we had to maintain the façade that we knew each other only as human and animal, as experimenter and subject, as scientist and science.
Sometimes on the weekends we would spend the whole day in bed. Sometimes we would spend two days at a stretch naked. Sometimes we would get home from the lab—finally released from the watchful and loveless eyes of Lydia’s colleagues, finally unlocked from a long chain of hours stressed tight with the laborious theatre of trying to act like we weren’t in love—and we would walk in the door and race immediately to the bedroom, articles of clothing flying from our persons all down