The Trouble With Eden - Lawrence Block [100]
He dated extensively, and most of the girls he dated obligingly ended the evening with their knees aimed skyward. The first time was in the fraternity house after a dance. He had taken his own girl home, petted furiously with her, and returned to the house. Another brother had passed out and his date was waiting around in the hope that he might get sober enough to take her back to her dormitory. Bert took her upstairs to a vacant bedroom and began necking with her, waiting for her to tell him to stop. There was a point when he realized that she was not going to stop him, and a great surge of triumph went through him—he was going to reach that impossible goal. It was going to happen; it was happening now.
None of the fears associated with the magic moment ever materialized. He was fully potent and able to sustain the act effortlessly. He brought her easily to orgasm, then erupted himself, emptying his passion into the warmth of her.
Afterward there was a heady glow that lasted for several hours. For some moments, alone in his own room, the girl mercifully gone, he managed to convince himself that he loved her. The notion passed rather quickly and he laughed at the thought of it. She was just a tramp, he decided. Her own date had passed out on her so she screwed the first person who asked her.
There were other girls, a great many of them. It was easy once you knew the moves. And, as the novelty of it wore off, so did much of the excitement. He never felt himself drawn to any of the girls he had sex with. They were vehicles for his own pleasure, and once he had used them he had little desire to see them again. He was not compulsive about this; there were girls he saw more than once, but he would withdraw from them completely and shut them out of his life once he sensed they wanted an emotional commitment from him. There was a danger in their moist warmth; it could capture a man by his private parts and suck him in like quicksand.
“It doesn’t mean all that much to me,” he said one night to a friend. “All through high school I walked around with a hard-on dreaming about what it would be like to get laid. And now it’s sort of a letdown, you know, discovering that that’s all there is to it.”
“Oh, come off it. Mr. Nonchalance.”
“No, I’m serious.”
“Well, you can afford to say it, for Christ’s sake. I mean, the amount of action you get.”
“All it is is action.”
“Bullshit. Then how come you’re chasing it as much as you do? When’s the last weekend you weren’t out there going after a piece?”
“I’m not saying I don’t like it.”
“White of you, LeGrand. Let’s hire a skywriter—‘LeGrand doesn’t dislike pussy.’ Christ on a crutch.”
“I mean, it beats doing without. Or jerking off.”
Except that it didn’t, not really. There were times when he would masturbate in his room, touching himself while he listened to music, timing his strokes to the music, purposely delaying the orgasm as long as possible. Often he would refrain from orgasm, stimulating himself to the very edge of it time after time, then letting his passion ebb unfulfilled. His fantasies at such times were abstract and diffuse. Sometimes there were no fantasies whatsoever, only the physical fact of his manual manipulations.
And it was often better than what he achieved with girls. He did not require it as compulsively as he seemed to require girls. He was not driven to it. But there was something