A Game of Stud and Slut
"The best part of...love is worship."
George Eliot, Felix Holt, The Radical, Ch. XXXVII
I had not gotten more than a few hours sleep each night for the past few weeks. When I found myself wakeful, I did not stay in bed. Rising from my mattress and dressing, I went out and took long walks through the city in the predawn November, not exactly cruising, not seeking, but presenting myself to the void, waiting. I read. I began painting again, copying the city pictures that kept shifting outside my windows as I watched. Nor did I have much appetite. Intake of food became a matter of making myself take something every day, lest I become ill. In consequence, I was thinner than I had ever been, but not yet scrawny or gaunt. I would not get that way. I liked the way I looked. My lack of sleep had bred in me a mood akin to romantic blues rather than listlessness. Rather than becoming dulled, I was full of energy; a little manic. I experienced a thrilling sharpness of mind and an uncanny depth of sensation. A spiral of desire spun out from the center of me. I gasped at the amplitude of my excitement. Yet, during the day, the hours I spent in the museum restoring ancient artifacts, I was absorbed, calm, and always precise in my movements. I was in the midst of the terribly delicate task of reconstructing a small Minoan clay amphora painted midnight blue and gold in the places where the clay was not left exposed, circled by a band of aroused young men dancing in a ring.
"Your work is beautiful," Sheila said. She was in charge of restorations. "How are you?" she then asked, with a note of solicitous concern.
"I'm ok," I said. I was truthful as well as evasive.
"You look strange," she said.
"Strange bad?"
"Not so bad," she grinned. "Still no chance."
"Sheila, I'm not made that way?"
"Do I need to turn into a boy?"
"Or I could turn into a girl."
It was warm, although November. The first week is often lovely. The Gingko trees still have their leaves, but now their summer's green is yellow. They gleamed like gold in the light of the streetlights. I had on a leather jacket, tight jeans and boots. Inside Benny's I slung my jacket over my shoulder, stretched my neck, tossing my head back. I had on a sleeveless lavender T-shirt. I smiled at several people I knew and was not interested in.
I hung out, spoke to some others. Nothing. Then we caught each other's eye and he winked at me. I smiled shyly. "Come here," he said by gesture. I did. "Tell me your name." "Evan," I said. "Mike Edwards," he said offering his hand. "You're very beautiful," he said. "You're very handsome," I responded. He put his palm on my thigh. I leaned over and kissed him. He cupped the back of my head in his palm. We kissed and smiled at each other. "Let's walk outside," he said. "K," I said, nodding.
"Come back to my place," he said. "Of course," I said.
He put his arm around my waist and pulled me to him. The streets were nearly empty. My mind felt sweetly empty. I looked up at him with big, vacant eyes. He smiled into them and kissed me as we walked.
He took my jacket off and my shirt, too. We were in candlelight, only. He gazed at my chest and touched my nipples. I reached out my hands, slipped them under his shirt, and took his nipples between my fingers and gently rubbed them. His breathing became hard and he reached for me, pressed his mouth to mine, invaded me with his breath and his tongue. I pinched his nipples harder. He writhed, clutched his hard cock and came in his hand.
"You are awesome," he said, taking hold of me by my stiff cock and drawing me to him. I rushed at him, encompassing his mouth with my lips. I rubbed him back to hardness. I begged him to fuck me. He pressed his fingers to his nipples and I followed and covered his nipples with my fingers and began pinching and twisting them and watched the ecstasy descend upon him. I lay under him and spread my legs apart. I lubed his cock with my spit and rubbed myself as I licked his nipples. I squeezed my legs around him like pliers and we joined inside me. He froze deep inside me and we were like a sculpture of muscular desire. I caressed his nipples and we began undulating as one body until I felt the jolts of his eruptions. His orgasm flooded me and became mine as I kissed him as if he were food.
Our breathing steadied and we lay enlaced, breathing happily.
"Stay here tonight." I did.
I kissed him and nuzzled even closer. We slept and when we woke, it was not yet dawn. He was sill inside me, soft and sweet as a bunny. We embraced and kissed and he stiffened and massaged my inner walls with his cock.
"Tell me you love me," he said.
"I love you," I said.
"What do you do during the day?" he said.
"I work at the museum. I restore ancient clay and ceramic artifacts."
He looked at me, and I saw a certain deference towards me fold into the depths of affection his eyes already confessed.
"And you?" I asked.
"I'm studying to be an architect. But I..." and he trailed off leaving something unsaid.
"You what?" I said.
"I don't have the feeling for it I once did."
I wanted to ask why, but decided I could wait. I saw it pained him to speak of it, and I changed the subject. "Do you want some coffee?" He smiled gleefully, as if he'd burst out of a fetid room into the fresh air. "Yes," he said.
"I will make it. I'll find everything I need in the kitchen?"
"You can't miss it. You don't mind I stay here?"
"I want you to. I want to bring you your coffee."
"I brought two cups on a silver tray, placed the tray on the bedside table and handed him one and then got in under the covers beside him and took the other cup from the side table. As we sipped our coffee, emissions of light were charging the air and weakening night's darkness. We rose and showered and dressed. "You really are beautiful," he said with delight, reverently fondling my pecs. I bent my head and lashed his nipple with my tongue. The air rushed out of him; his eyes closed. He was overcome with the sensation of tasting something delicious.
Christmas had come and gone and so had the New Year. Mike published an essay on Architecture in An Age of Plutocracy in a glossy magazine that was doing an issue devoted to Architecture and Culture: The Culture of Architecture and the Architecture of Culture. It was bitter and idealistic, saturated with youthful eloquence and ire. In it he attacked the purpose of architecture when it was removed from the service of humanity and turned to the glorification of wealth and power. He argued further that there was not even the redeeming factor of incommensurate beauty and grandeur that had defined the architecture of previous centuries when it was in bondage to either royal or ecclesiastical pomp and glory. He became a regular contributor writing culture criticism. He dropped out of school. He told me he could not build anything when there was so much to tear down, and the first things he had to tear down were his expectations to live a life of financial ease. He would be restricted. In fact, the apartment he was living in now was paid for by his parents -- so long as he was enrolled in graduate school. Dropping out meant sacrificing his apartment and looking for a much cheaper one. He asked how wise I thought it was for him to go ahead and follow his lights. Or should he buckle down and take the compensations?
"If you don't follow your own heart, you won't be you. And then," I said throwing my arms around his neck and looking up into his eyes, "what will become of me?" He smiled at me and caressed my hair. "As for having a place to live," I continued, "move in with me."
He loves me. He told me he loves me. That had never happened to me in all my encounters with ecstasy. Even when I had lived with a guy, which did happen, for several months at a time. Love never happened. Love makes demands and I was not into that. But now it was different.
"Do you know what that means?" I said. "It means that you are taking possession of me and that you are responsible for my happiness."
"And you are responsible for mine," he said. "Living together is easy," he continued, "but devotion is something else. It is either spontaneously free-flowing and impossible to hold back or it is simply impossible no matter how hard you try."
"That's what I want," I said.
When one of the guys he hung out with when he went to the gym died of A.I.D.S. he shivered most of the night. I held his hand and sometimes pressed myself against him and stayed until I felt the tremble inside him subside. I held him in my arms and kissed his eyelids and heard his breathing go deeper and I felt an easement in my own breathing. I whispered "sweet sleep," and lay on my back next to him feeling the happy coolness of the sheets, and I slept, too. In the morning he was quiet and spent the day writing. I bicycled over to the museum and lost myself in identifying shards of Etruscan pottery and reconstructing fierce little statuettes.
"The shrinking that belongs to our dearest need:" George Eliot used the phrase in Felix Holt, the Radical. I think what she means by it is that when it comes to admitting and surrendering to what is our deepest need – there is presumed a hierarchy of needs, some less important than others and that, therefore, can be sacrificed without much pain, loss, or impunity; but not so the important needs – when it comes to admitting and surrendering to our deepest need, we hold back from an identification with it, with our deepest need The deepest need is the buried need that we can feel beating in our depths like a scorned heart.
Once I had surrendered to Mike, I felt such freshness of being that it was obvious to me that "I" had been destroyed. Perhaps transformed is a better word. But transformation does involve destruction.
I am not being metaphysical. I mean my words quite concretely – so concretely, in fact, that I must dance around the outcome with all these unspooling sentences. Writing is behavior. I was different from how I had been. Without surrendering my outward masculinity, I had, in spirit, become feminine in the way femininity has been traditionally portrayed. It is a pre-feminism femininity, and it is not the exclusive property of women, just as all the traditionally masculine characteristics are not the exclusive provenance of men. What I am trying to say is that sometimes, in order to show outwardly the inner revolution that had overthrown me and had re-established me as a truer representative of myself, I dressed in women's clothing, costuming myself entirely as a girl, and offering myself to Mike, who played Stud and Slut with me.
How do you play Stud and Slut? It was often on a Thursday evening we'd begin the game, unsure how long it might last, but not longer than Sunday evening. I did not have to be back at the museum till Tuesday. Mike's time was his own, but it also had to be fitted to deadlines. Deadlines were not to be complained about. They were the proofs of employment. Mike was getting printed. His essays appeared regularly in The New York Review of Books and The New Yorker.
I'd get home around seven Thursday nights. Mike would not be home yet; he stayed late at the gym, working out or hanging around with some of the guys he knows there, doing whatever they do that makes them feel bonded – as they say.
When I got home, I'd strip and shower and freshly shave my entire body, except for my pride of wavy blond hair. Then I'd run a bath and reclin in lovely perfumed warm water, sucking now and then on a joint I kept nearby.
When Mike got home, I was dazzling, tonight wearing a backless, skin-tight, gold-lamé mini-dress, that showed me off so well, five-inch, gold heels to match, a gold bracelet, gold choker, and shimmering golden earrings dangling above my bare shoulders. I had painted my lips cherry red and dusted my eyelids with gold gloss. He rang the bell. I opened the door to our apartment, took his hand, kissed him on the mouth, and handed him a glass of champagne. He raised the glass to his lips, took a sip and then touching my lips with his, rewarded me with a champagne kiss. I gasped to feel the cold leather of his jacket crushing my bare skin. I lifted my head as he kissed me. I unzipped his jacket and ran my palm across his chest, brushing over the tips of his hard nipples. I lingered, circling around the base as his tongue touched deeper inside the cavern of my throat and I knew the power of his need for me. I stretched to him as he kissed me.