Viewpoints.
An apple is an orange.
She knew his kiss, he knew her kiss. His mouth was gentle upon hers, he thought, cushioned by her shy and soft and tenderly inquiring lips. She thought of her own mouth as voracious and thin; she wanted to bite his tongue, and his lips on hers were curiously harsh, his mouth was not at all tender. He touched her breasts and her nipples — he had touched them before — but there was nothing erotic to him about the practiced movement of his hands. He knew the nipples would pucker gently, and his hands worked in a repeated ritual, probing scouts in the employ of a bored and confident mercenary. My breasts inflame him, she thought, and this image of a rampaging, rapacious male animal, unable to control his hands, ripping off her blouse and her bra, violating her nipples, was erotic and stimulating and perhaps transmitted itself unconsciously to him because he found himself becoming erect, and he moved against her and put his mouth on her breast and flicked the nipple with his exploring tongue. She did not know the feel of an erection except as an outward experience, the uncoiling of soft flesh against her thigh; she did not know the inner surge and restless stirring, the mind-coupled anticipation, the flowing rush of passion to a single extending, unsheathed, sensitively expectant part of the body. She knew only the touch of his teeth on her nipples, alternately one and then the other, and whereas his tongue could feel the sudden stiffening, it was she who experienced her flesh distending and enlarging, she who felt that the tips of her breasts would burst through the expanding purple skin and fill his mouth, while only vaguely aware of the probing rigid arch against her thigh, which to him was all-consuming. She seized him more in conditioned response than in counterattack, but to him her grasp was wildly exciting; she became for him in that instant the fictional heroine foisted upon all American males from the moment of their birth, the passionate achingly aggressive female en-flamed by the impending touch and sight of a man, the insatiable nymphomaniac. There was perhaps some of this in her, yes, the knowledge that her hand tentatively contained in curling warmth this live and growing member; yes, this knowledge was exciting and it spread in tingling electric tendrils to her groin where it became a vague and undefined urge. But more exciting to her was the certainty that for now she controlled this pulsing flesh, that it would grow immense at her command, that it was attainable through engorgement, that it could become an encircled, intimately possessed part of her solely because she urged it to. He knew only that her hand tightened on him, and he sought her womb in grasping reciprocation, the wished-for return. The natural ooze of lubrication became to him an imagined torrent of rushing female juices at the mouth of a dark and secret cave awaiting his exploration. Her breasts, her buttocks, her abdomen, the soft wet inner flesh of her thighs, all became targets for his questing hands, all thought of exciting her gone now in his own blind excitement which nonetheless excited her. It was he who at last invaded, and the feel to him was one of resisting wet lips and beyond that of a molten pool, a tunnel with live walls crumbling, a real invasion, yes, the thrust of undisputed force into a yielding and vulnerable interior — but this she did not feel. She felt instead an opening wide of herself, a stretching to receive. She felt on her quivering lips at first a hovering, tentative, round and rigid inquiry. She felt everything moving inward then, he and herself, a turning in; she felt a yearning need to accommodate and adjust to the width and the girth and the length of him, to enwrap, to gather and enfold. This was not to her an invasion. They stood at opposite ends of the same tunnel, seeing entirely different things.
But in his invasion, in the proud masculine power of his attack, there was also the fear of being surrounded, and so he pounded at yielding walls that had already succumbed, and nonetheless felt himself slowly engulfed by their very mucoid unresistance; he would lose himself inside her, he would become an irredeemable part of her oozing interior, he would explode within her and join her by osmosis. Powerless to command, powerless to retreat, he bludgeoned blindly and relentlessly, knowing that in his moment of supreme power, he would be inexplicably weakest. And in her receiving, in her vast and obliging female acceptance, there was the fear of losing control completely, the unspoken and frightening desire to allow this throbbing and engorging force to impale her unmercifully, to use her and abuse her, to pillage after abject surrender, to destroy and overwhelm and absorb, to mock in superiority, to degrade and debase, to turn her cheering street parade into a disorganized undignified rout.
Somehow out of these separately converging, touching, converging viewpoints; somehow out of this vague and mutually ignorant confusion of love and hate; somewhere out of an overwhelming need to satisfy, to give unselfishly; somewhere out of a contradictory urge to control and enslave, somehow, somewhere there arose a true moment of compassion where indeed the universes did collide, where indeed Buddwing and the girl were briefly joined together and wedded as they had promised to be. In this single ecstatic moment of exchange, they became one body, mindless; one driving force, genderless. They shared together a sense of mutual pity and contempt, of guilt and exaltation, of charity and supplication, of abundance and of need. In that moment, they clung to each other in total isolation and heard the echo of a billion sighs lost in the corridors of the night, and felt for the briefest tick of time that they really knew each other, when actually they had learned only that they were human.
14
He sat up in bed and grinned and said, “Let’s make some coffee, okay? Would you like to make some coffee?”
“Sure,” she said agreeably. “I’ve got some on the stove. All I have to do is heat it.”
He was feeling very cheerful and cozy, and he liked being here with this girl, protected from the rain that oozed along the windowpanes and rattled in the street outside. The girl moved off the bed with a graceful swiveling motion, got to her feet, and walked to where her half-slip was draped over the chair. She put it on quickly, and then went to the stove in the kitchen. He watched her as she lighted a match. She bent to study the flame as it leaped from the jet. There was something about her pose, her attitude, that brought him great pleasure; the bent head, the concentration on her face, the curved back illuminated with a sheen of light from the windows facing Third Avenue, all were somehow familiar and reassuring to him. The apartment was very still, and the girl suddenly began humming as she stood with her hands on her hips and watched the pot of coffee. Outside, he could hear the clinging swish of automobile tires against the asphalt. The rain, the bookshelves bracketing the sofa bed, the girl’s humming and the hiss of the tires, the panes dissolving in reflected neon from the street outside, all seemed of a piece, harmonious and serene. He grinned and lay back with his hands behind his head and tried to read the titles of the books upside down.
“Have you read all of these?” he asked her.
“Most of them,” she said from the kitchen. “How do you feel?”
“Great.”
“Yeah, me too,” she said, and she grinned at him, and then turned to look at the pot again. He rolled over onto his stomach and looked up at the books.
The Sane Society.
Interviewing: Its Principles and Techniques.
Our Inner Conflicts.
The Neurotic Personality of Our Time.
The Compulsion to Confess.
Essentials in Interviewing.
The Psychoanalytic Approach to Juvenile Delinquency.