Women - Charles Bukowski [219]
“Oh no,” said Sara, “not so soon. I haven’t had a chance to talk to you. I’d like to talk to you.”
She looked at Ron. “You understand, don’t you, Ron?”
“Sure.”
He got up and walked to the back of the house.
“Hey,” I said, “I don’t want to start any shit.”
“What shit?”
“Between you and your roommate.”
“Oh, there’s nothing between us. No sex, nothing. He rents the room in the back of the house.”
“Oh.”
I heard the sound of a guitar. Then loud singing.
“That’s Ron,” said Sara.
He just bellowed and called the hogs. His voice was so bad that no comment was needed.
Ron sang on for an hour. Sara and I drank some more wine. She lit some candles. “Here, have a beedie.”
I tried one. A beedie is a small brown cigarette from India. It had a good tart taste. I turned to Sara and we had our first kiss. She kissed well. The evening was looking up.
The screen door swung open and a young man walked into the room.
“Barry,” said Sara, “I’m not having any more visitors.”
The screen door banged and Barry was gone. I foresaw future problems: as a recluse I couldn’t bear traffic. It had nothing to do with jealousy, I simply disliked people, crowds, anywhere, except at my readings. People diminished me, they sucked me dry.
“Humanity, you never had it from the beginning.” That was my motto.
Sara and I kissed again. We both had drunk too much. Sara opened another bottle. She held her wine well. I have no idea what we talked about. The best thing about Sara was that she made very few references to my writing. When the last bottle was empty I told Sara that I was too drunk to drive home.
“Oh, you can sleep in my bed, but no sex.”
“Why?”
“One doesn’t have sex without marriage.”
“One doesn’t?”
“Drayer Baba doesn’t believe in it.”
“Sometimes God can be mistaken.”
“Never.”
“All right, let’s go to bed.”
We kissed in the dark. I was a kiss freak anyway, and Sara was one of the best kissers I had ever met. I’d have to go all the way back to Lydia to find anyone comparable. Yet each woman was different, each kissed in her own way. Lydia was probably kissing some son of a bitch right now, or worse, kissing his parts. Katherine was asleep in Austin.
Sara had my cock in her hand, petting it, rubbing it. Then she pressed it against her cunt. She rubbed it up and down, up and down against her cunt. She was obeying her God, Drayer Baba. I didn’t play with her cunt because I felt that would offend Drayer. We just kissed and she kept rubbing my cock against her cunt, or maybe against the clit, I didn’t know. I waited for her to put my cock in her cunt. But she just kept rubbing. The hairs began to burn my cock. I pulled away.
“Good night, baby,” I said. And then I turned, rolled over and put my back up against her. Drayer Baby, I thought, you’ve got one helluva believer in this bed.
In the morning we began the rubbing bit again with the same end result. I decided, to hell with it, I don’t need this kind of non-action.
“You want to take a bath?” Sara asked.
“Sure.”
I walked into the bathroom and let the water run. Sometime during the night I had mentioned to Sara that one of my insanities was to take 3 or 4 steaming hot baths a day. The old water therapy.
Sara’s tub held more water than mine and the water was hotter. I was five feet, eleven and ¾ inches and yet I could stretch out in the tub. In the old days they made bathtubs for emperors, not for 5 foot bank clerks.
I got into the tub and stretched. It was great. Then I stood up and looked at my poor raw cunt-hair-rubbed cock.