a sexual incident

Port-drunk, fortified and nauseous, she kissed with the force of an active vacuum cleaner, her tongue working his like baker’s hands, her mouth sucking so hard her cheeks sunk in with it, he could feel it with the one palm he kept to her face throughout as though in confirmation of her presence, but he – himself demonstrably guilty of the same two characteristics – was unsure whether it was ferocious exuberance or inexperience that belied such a technique. Her near-perfect breasts felt unreal in his palms, her cunt swallowed his probing fingers sunk to the knuckle with the same determination her mouth employed, and he was painfully aroused by the tangible fantasy of the stockings and suspender belt she wore in the bed where others wore pyjamas. He didn’t dare attempt the humiliation of their botched removal and instead pushed the gusset of her underwear damp to one side and felt the curls of her hair and the cunt itself and surged with life. One of the great regrets would remain the fact that it had been too dark to see, and the only image he had – would ever have – had been constructed like a blind man by touch. 

As the incident proceeded and then continued to occur in his mind he recalled lines from a poem he had composed a year or so earlier, a poem concerned with imagined incidents of the most sexual grouping, written in an attempt to somehow eternalize the very depth of the lust he felt for the girl then still in school and the associated physical trappings that clung to and from her like sensitive architecture, like fleshy emblems of man-made prowess. It was the kind of poor and derivative poetry at which he had always excelled (and which was why he had turned his back on poetry at all), with one decent stanza – essentially a pretty candid list of the ways in which he wanted to fuck her (unless your sister watches/unless I lose myself in your cunt/unless I can strip you quick and just watch myself doing it/unless you flap the musk of your cunt sails against me, your tender twat, your sugar snap snatch/unless my spunk fills you up until it drips in globs from your eyes like milky tears/unless you’ve felt an unsheathed cock buried up to its hilt in you – already acknowledging both his own coldness and weird inevitable removal from situations of imminent release and physical inadequacy by settling for, even inviting an indefinite, unspecified, unsheathed cock, not even, especially not his own) which, despite lifting one or two maybe three-plus lines straight from the Henry Miller he was reading and didn’t dare understand (without credit – this preceded the conventions of academia), still managed to convey a sense of truthfulness for the first and some would say last time in his writing simply because the sex acts he described were so void of the monotony and pointlessness and guilt and expectation of actual real-life sexual encounters (and were instead rife with the kind of joyous thigh slapping guffawing pumping and gobbling that reside solely within the purview of the imagination) that, ironically, their so-considered ‘truth’ was borne specifically of their non-existence/occurrence – that was bookended by two of the atrociously tepid cod-existential musings that are a prerequisite of late teenage insecurity, misreading or paraphrasing the continentals into soundbites of shared reconstituted angst and whose only conceivable depth might be found in the self-same sink unit into which they (which is to say, the stanzas) should be rightfully, forcibly expelled with the very puke strained out after a shared bottle of vermouth, gravely not enjoyed but solemnly swallowed regardless, as though acting on the limp refrain of a suburban UK rock song. A first foray into erotica, the poem’s uncomfortable coupling of candid intercourse and struggling conceptualisation would characterise his later work, his own staunch commitment to some arbitrary literary integrity that he theorized first out of and then back into existence (itself but a transparent defence against the critiques levelled at his uncontrolled sentences and fragile plotting – fuck plot! – in the occasional creative writing workshop he grimaced his way through smugly) unfortunately rendering every even vaguely erotic skit increasingly and weirdly unsexy the more of it, which is to say sex, he actually had. He would not pander, he said, to an audience of shitlines. It was and should be work to read. His fears were redundant, his audience immeasurably small, even non-existent.  

They went at it for some time and he lifted her hands from his shoulders and his lower back down to his prick but they lingered only momentarily, impersonally across it with all the tenderness of an uncertain handshake. He tried to work at it himself but could not do her simultaneously, his brain frozen with the distinct fine gestures, his fingers dead still in her cunt with every self-stroke he managed. It must have only been eleven o’clock or similar but felt much later, and very soon their kissing lost something and without discussion or precedent simply petered out like an engine failing, a mutual acknowledgement of futility. They extracted themselves from each other and lay for several moments in the dark, she then sat up on the edge of the bed and straightened her underwear and placed one hand on one of his and said goodnight and returned to her own bedroom. He could see the brilliant white of her teeth and knew already that this huge thing was nothing, just nothing, and though he tried immediately to play the events back in his mind, to relive them while he wanked himself to sleep, they were already gone or going, flickering into the indecipherable like damaged video tape, like some kind of neural flutter or remnant, a reflexive, instinctual sentiment of undetectable source, like a twitch post-mortem of the most primal motor function, then gone. The taste of the fortified wine on his lips turned his stomach and he rolled to one side and hoped he wouldn’t need to puke, and felt grim guilt followed by honour as he came reluctantly onto the sheets and slept poorly as he always did in the beds of others. 

The next day they ate breakfast in the winter sunshine, along with her sister and a couple of other friends who had slept elsewhere but then were there. They sat far apart and didn’t touch or speak but smiled broadly, their mouths as ancient cracks in the landscape. The dark romp had been a short glimpse of something now forever absent, already too distant to paraphrase or allude to. With her sister and his good friend they drove her to a ballet class, and while she hugged her sister and his good friend goodbye she barely acknowledged him when she left the car. He wanted to throw the door open and run after her and say something but there was nothing and so he didn’t, and felt sure it would prove to be the right thing to do. 

As they drove through the countryside and the violence of the tree’s bare branches to their respective houses he imagined holding the burning sun within an emptied out jam jar as some relic or token which he could present to the girl as perhaps the most potent symbol of his feelings, the most physical of all offerings, to give to her the giver of life. The jar would smell slightly of blackcurrant and sugar, the flavour the jam had been before it had been made into sandwiches or toast, and the sun would spill from its glass edges almost immediately, too great to be confined within its limits, and the devastation would be unashamed. Every time he closed his eyes he would see a sun shaped light reflected on his eyelids, would hear the sun’s laughter embracing the earth.  

Over the months and even years that followed his lust and obsession incrementally dissipated as is the wont of affairs of the genitals of youth, and were replaced by others and yet others in layers of new arousal that formed solid structures over the lusts of the past and formed personality like ancient rock forged into mountain ranges by dreadful loneliness, layers of memory and feeling as abundant sediment rich with resource and deposited for mining at some unspecified future point.  

He saw her again as part of larger social instances, but the erotic tryst of their recent past was so incredibly unmentioned that he couldn’t be sure he hadn’t imagined the whole thing, though he knew he hadn’t, the lingering feeling of anatomy on his hands and his tongue serving as permanent scarring reminders of what nearly happened but not. Increasingly these sightings would involve new and always handsome boyfriends, nice enough guys whose hands he shook insincerely, remembering his poem in silence as he offered deliberately obtuse small talk and waited for the night to end. Some maxim’s carry pertinence beyond the page. The nondescript man with the iron pectorals and the bald chest always gets the fucking girl.