My Sense of Being
Laced tight into it, Andrew felt the corset reshape him, forcing his body to assume its dimensions, forcing his waist to diminish, his tummy to flatten, his breath to become finer, his pectorals to blossom, his mind to float away.
"How sexy you look," Herbert said as he watched Andrew slip a sleeveless black sheath over his head, stretching to a new height, lifted by the heels he wore. Smoothing his skirt, Andrew surveyed his legs in the mirror. Herbert watched him.
"You are very beautiful," he said. Stretching a hand towards his legs, Herbert added, "I can just get a glimpse of the straps from your garter belt pulling at the stockings. You have gorgeous legs. Come over here so I can caress them. Do you know what you have become?" Herbert said, grinning.
"A complete, needy slut," Andrew said, bending toward him as he spoke.
Herbert kissed him and let him run his hands over his bare muscular chest.
"You didn't fuck me last night. You know how badly I need it. Please," Andrée said as he pressed himself against Herbert and raised his head to Herbert's, which loomed above him and which he sought with longing eyes when he looked at him.
Herbert smiled and caressed his cheek.
"That depends on how good a girl you are."
Andrée stood up straight, one hand on her hip, the other she rubbed slowly back and forth over her lips.
Herbert moved her finger away and replaced it with his. Andrée touched it with his tongue and followed it back and forth over his lips. His breathing became heavy and he began to open, and dilated with desire.
"Please fuck me. I'll be a very good girl."
Herbert silenced him with a kiss, overcame him, possessed him, undressed him and lay above him. Andree's legs straddled Herbert's shoulders. Herbert teased him until he slipped his masterful cock all the way up into him. Andree gasped, clasped him with his eyes, brought his body as close to Herbert as he could. His ass trembled, shook, rubbed, grabbed, and rocked in response to Herbert's thrusts and retractions. Shrieks of unbearable pleasure choked him.
They fell asleep and when their eyes regained sight they gazed at one another.
"That was..." Andrew began but Herbert shushed him.
"I have something for you. Look."
He took a long red velvet box off the marble-top table beside the bed. A necklace, a gold chain; pendant from the middle link: a glass copy of the Dresden Green Diamond.
"It's beautiful," Andrew gasped.
"Bend. Let me fasten it around your neck."
Andrew gazed into the mirror on the table beside the bed at his chest and the chain that collard him and the jewel that sat in the valley between his pecs.
"It's...Thank you."
Herbert lifted the glass diamond and drew Andrée to him and brought his lips down on his. Andrée heaved a great sigh and all the breath went out of her and she felt herself nothing but a possession belonging to Herbert, entirely his and wanting nothing else but to be his girl.
"I can't go out in weather like this," Andrew said, turning back from the window and the snowy night that it gave onto. The room was warm and he was wearing just a pair of black briefs. He was also wearing black eyeliner and a soft pink lipstick.
"It will give you a chance to wear your thigh high boots and your black leather mini-dress," Herbert consoled him, "and your great black cape with the hood."
"When you put it that way..." Andrew said and went into their bedroom and sat down at his make-up table.
Herbert followed him and took a shirt, still in its laundry package, out of his dresser, and a suit and tie from his closet. Andrew saw him in the mirror as he was lining his eyes and powdering the lids with a delicate pale green powder. He stopped and watched, enthralled by Herbert's lithe physique. He put down the tin of powder, got up. He stood in front of Herbert and, taking him by the hips, knelt in front of him and took his full but hardly erect cock in his mouth, and tongued and sucked it dreamily until it began to respond and insist on the domination that was its rightfully. Andrew's mouth expanded around it; his throat dilated, and he felt it overcoming him. Andrew's entire mouth yielded to Herbert's cock, worshipping it. He, too, was hard and would come without his cock being touched. He was a good girl.
A cab came to their door.
"This isn't so bad," Herbert said, as the cab took its way slowly down Ninth Avenue through the blizzard.
"Everybody made it," Jonathan proclaimed as he opened the door and greeted them. Andrée presented a bottle of champagne and kissed him. Jonathan slipped his hand through the placket of her cape and grazed the silk panties under the leather miniskirt she had on, slowly caressing her cock and setting off chills of desire inside her.
Andrew put his fingers to Jonathan's lips, restraining him.
"Not yet. Don't wipe me out before the night has even begun."
"Everything you do is seductive."
She kissed him as if it were forever and then backed away. He looked at her with obedient eyes.
Herbert felt a glow of pride in ownership.
Later that night, as they were undressing, Herbert looked at Andrew and nodded his head appreciatively as he spoke.
You have a power over people. I can see it. They obey you. They seem to want to, hoping that way to win you, to be noticed. They need you to notice them. It's a physical need. That's what gives you power over them. You make a need in people for you to let them adore you. It's uncanny."
Herbert put out his arms and Andrew walked over to him and collapsed into his embrace.
"I need you to notice me," he said. "And I love it when you adore me because I know that however much you do – and I can feel how much you do -- it will never be as much as I adore you."
Herbert sought to maintain distance between his personal life and his public persona. He believed in privacy, and he believed in social and civic engagement. Within the circle of his intimates, it was not necessary to put a barrier between person and persona. But in the wider world it was, not only because of the nature of his inner and intimate life but because, whatever that essence might be or how he might realize it, Herbert believed that the division, the separation between private and public, was aesthetically a proper one, fitting as an armor, protecting the cherished, tender, and vulnerable center from despoilment.
Andrew greatly admired him since first he read his book, Character and the Ethical Foundation of Dreams. When Herbert came to speak at NYU, Andrew awaited the date of his appearance with over-wrought eagerness. He expected someone older. Pictures of him were scarce. His books never had a pose of him on the back. When Andrew saw him his breathing was arrested. He was not old...older, yes...but he was impossible to stop looking at.
He held his drink and noticed Andrée looking at him, radiating desire.
"You liked my talk?" he said approaching her and greeting her with the question and a small tilt of his glass. He knew without anyone having to tell him. He recognized him, and already had taken him to his heart.
"I did. Could you tell?"
"I can tell. If it were not so, words would dry up in my mouth."
"You need someone to keep it moist," Andrew said giggling at his own impertinence.
Herbert took his hand between both of his, and looked, smiling warmly, into his eyes. "You'll do."
"How can you not be bothered by the age difference?" Harriet asked.
"Twenty years does not feel like," Andrew began but Harriet interrupted him. "When you're twenty, it should."
"I really don't think about age one way or an other with regard to him, but if everything I love and admire and that excites me about him – his warmth and generosity, his personality, his intelligence, his grace and sophistication, his body, the way he talks to me and touches me -- is the result of those extra twenty years, I'm glad he has them. And if part of my allure for him is a freshly blooming naïve young body eager to yield to him, I'm glad that I am able to give it to him for him to cultivate."
"You talk like a nineteenth-century heroine."
"What's wrong with nineteenth-century heroines?"
"Nothing is wrong with them, but they are dated and out of date. They were called heroines. But they were really victims and gluttons for suffering."
"I'm not a victim," Andrew smiled surely and shook his head. "And I'm not a glutton, for suffering – or anything else."
Harriet would not relent. She acknowledged his assertion with a smile of sure doubt, of contempt and dismissal.
"I have to be somewhere," Andrew said abruptly, tossed five bucks on the table for his coffee, and left.
"I'm sorry for you," she sneered.
Even though he thought he should not, he could not help feeling sad. He knew Harriet's heart pained her and that she could not help the vinegar that she sprinkled over everything. But he was not responsible for her heart. What was he responsible for? Not for Herbert, either, but for the relationship that he and Herbert had made. His life was bound not just to Herbert, but to it, to their relationship. For that reason, he was responsible for Herbert's heart, and Herbert was responsible for his. That was the strength of their relationship. His heart was not bound to her. He never offered it. That it was not to be hers had been a matter of instinctive choice for him – her heart did not touch him -- and a wound to her. But it was a self-inflicted wound. Her feelings about him, he did not choose to let them rule him. It was not his obligation. He did not want to live beholden to obligations but to desires. When a desire is a felt desire, only then it properly becomes an obligation.
"You don't think of anyone but yourself," she had said. "You have an effect -- by just being, and the effects you have, they have consequences. The root of social harmony is concern for the consequences that result just from the fact that you exist among other people. If you don't understand that, you aren't fully human."
"What does it mean to be fully human?" Andrew wondered. "The phrase does not make sense. However you are, you are fully human. Even being partially human, if such a thing were possible, would be being fully human. You are human or you are not human. Every human being is fully human. Might not always be such a wonderful thing."
Andrew had not been lying when he told Harriet that he had to be somewhere, even though such a line invented only to extricate himself from a situation he no longer cared to be in would have been perfectly reasonable. He rushed through the early November streets along Washington Square Park, glorified by the glistening yellow of the gingko leaves.
Herbert was waiting, an espresso on the table in front of him.
"Something is the matter," Andrée said, sensing it.
"Something is the matter," Herbert answered in confirmation.
"Tell me?" Andrew said, sitting up straight and gazing gently into Herbert's eyes.
"They want revisions."
Andrew waited. Herbert remained silent.
"Revisions?"
Herbert was impatient and snapped at him. "Changes, excisions."
"Go slower, please. What changes? What excisions? What for?"
"You mean there could be a good reason?"
"I did not say that. I mean what are they objecting to and why? It's good to know. Knowing their reasons does not mean justifying what they do or what they think."
Herbert laughed and shook his head.
"You look so macho when you talk like that."
"Now you're trying to be evasive. What went on?"
"Cuts. Complaints from one of the corporate parents."
"You don't have to do it."
"By contract, I owe one more book; they can publish this one without my consent and without my approval. They edit the book to their specifications. That's it."
"But that violates everything that publishing ought to be about."
"They own the book, even the parts they banish from the printed text. I can't publish those parts. No one would. Infringing on a copyright. Asking for trouble."
"But you can write about this, and you can say what was omitted -- just in different words -- why you think it was cut, what that means. I'm embarrassed. You know all this better than I do. I learned it from you."
Herbert openly took Andrew's hand, brought it to his lips and kissed the open palm, then the wrist. He reached with his other hand and caressed André's cheek.
I looked at them with envy and imagined them as I made them in this story. Without acknowledging me, although I sensed that they had noticed me, they left. I followed them with my eyes until the door closed behind them. I looked straight in front of me at nothing. I wished I lived in the world they inhabited. I was pensive but blank. At last, I managed to shake myself. I stood up, fished a ten out of my wallet and went out into the evening. Outside I was still unable to focus. The streets passed me by. >From minute to minute I could not remember whatever I had thought the minute before.
I got home with a sense of relief, and collapsed in an armchair. From a ceramic box on the side table I took the pipe that had some dope in it and took a few short tokes. I relaxed into myself and realized how much I wanted to see myself in the mirror, to admire myself in the various poses I liked to assume. My breathing was becoming heavy and I felt compelled by desire. There was no one else to share desire with, whose desire would amplify mine. I thought of going back down into the street, but could not muster the energy to do it. And nothing would come of it anyway. I wanted to pose in front of the mirror and arouse myself, Instead I fell onto my bed and fell asleep.
I woke. It was still night, and I was still dressed. I sat up. There was a rare moment of total silence. My heart was beating. Three a.m. is not a good time to be swamped by shapeless longing. The ache of it infiltrates the spirit too persuasively. Raw will-o'-the-wisp pain had usurped sleep. I began to breathe more and more deeply. Sobs caught in my throat and would not emerge; grim, sad memories flooded feelingly through me. I continued breathing. Sighs gathered within, but tears could not break. I trembled, but I had no sense of where any of this was taking me. I just kept staying with it, when what I wanted was to get away from it. Or it stayed with me, despite my objections. No. It only existed as a result of my making it exist. I stayed with it; kept bringing it back. It was my construction and it became who I was. Without it I'd have had no floor. My sense of it made me dizzy. That's why I needed... I could not exactly say what I needed. I always believed in waiting – that something, destined – in Rilke's words, to make my small life grow – waited for me, if I knew only the right way to wait.
The sky began to lighten. I slept a little, got up early, washed –shocked myself with cold water – and went down for coffee.
"You're early this morning."
"Good morning, Marco. Sleep is elusive."
"Espresso?"
"Double."
"No wonder you have trouble sleeping," Marco said, going behind the bar and working the espresso machine.
I was surprised when the guy I'd modeled Andrew on came into the place and sat down by himself. He ordered coffee, black. Marco served it in a mug. He took it by the handle and sipped it carefully. He noticed I was staring at him and smiled. I smiled back shyly, apologetically.
"You've been here before, at night," `Andrew' said, making friendly talk, taking the initiative.
"I live two buildings down, so I generally get coffee here," I said.
"What do you do?" he said, "if I'm not out of line."
"No," I said. "I teach...English...at City College."
"Like it?"
I shrugged. "There's worse."
"That's a long way to travel every day."
"I get a lot of work done on the train...What do you do?" I asked a touch too demurely.
"I study Philosophy at The New School," he said. "I'm Douglas, by the way," `Andrew' said reaching over and extending a hand."
"Michael," I said. "Douglas," I repeated, as if it were a revelation. Ok.
I finished my coffee and stood to go, at the same time bending over to say good-bye, but he stopped me. "Where are you going?" he said.
"To the Hudson." I said.
"I'll go with you, if that's ok."
"Sure," I said.
"You don't work today?"
"Not Thursdays."
"We saw you, you know."
"You saw me?"
"Looking at us."
"Looking at you?"
"What were you doing?"
"Daydreaming."
"About us?"
"Yah," I confessed.
"What do you imagine?"
"I can't tell you that."
"Why not?"
I did not answer.
"It's too revealing," Douglas volunteered.
By now we had reached the river. It was chilly and leaden. It looked like snow.
"Come on, what were you imagining?"
I sputtered that I didn't just daydream. I told him I had written a story and made the two of them characters, that I imagined a life around them and the kind of relationship they had.
"Did this figure into it?" Douglas said, taking me round the neck and kissing me with a gentle harshness, with a sense of dominance that was irresistible. His hands were in my pants and he held my balls in his cupped palm. I felt the warmth of grasp permeate me. I yielded to his kisses and returned them enraptured.
He pressed his body into mine. He sucked the breath out of me and drove his own breath into me back beyond my throat.
We went to my place and I let him read the thing I'd written. While he sat reading from the screen of my desktop, I brewed espresso in the kitchen and brought it out. I handed him one and took the other.
"You're good," he said. "It's uncanny."
"If I need to, I apologize."
"You don't need to."
It was cold and wet, late in November. In a few days the streets would be swarming with December revelers and the windows would be blazing out swarms of colors. But now, it was grim. I dodged the wind and soon reached Washington Square.
The coffee shop was glowing through its long glass windows with the amber light from its lamps. I found them inside. The possibility that they would not be there, that the invitation to join them was a trick... But there they were.
"We weren't sure you'd come," Douglas said, standing and offering me a chair. When I was sitting and facing "Herbert," Douglas introduced me to him. His name was Edward.
"Why would you think I would not come?" I asked, made uneasy by my own fear that this meeting was somehow some kind of trap.
"You'd know that better than I would," Edward said.
"No," I said. "Here I am."
"And?"
"And...what do you want to happen?"
"What do you mean?"
"What do you want to happen?"
I gestured my sense of being at a loss without saying anything.
"You imagined us. You want something.
I said nothing.
"Come back to our place."
"Is that an invitation or a command?"
"That depends on you. Let's go," Douglas said with an indecipherable smile, slipping an arm round my shoulders, perhaps as a sign of affection, but more likely to show me that I was going where he was taking me.
I let him guide me, leaning into him and giving in to a great sense of ease and pleasure. It was not raining now, the ice had gone out of the air, and the wind had blown itself out. The air was calm.
We passed along Washington Square Park. We took the elevator up to the fifteenth floor. Their place was grand. I was in awe. It was warm, too, and we stripped down to t shirts and jeans. Douglas began rolling a joint and Edward brought in a tray with stem glasses and a bottle of champagne.
"We want to celebrate your presence," he said to me. "Stand up."
I did as I was told, anticipating something I could not imagine, and very much feeling that I was being obedient, and feeling proud that I was. "Take your clothes off."
Too often, when I desired something sexual, I was stymied, could not move. Worse, perhaps, I did not feel desire as desire. I felt the force of attraction as a threat I had to defend against. Now, I was bathed in sexuality, I felt desire, and desire felt like an inviting force.
My erection stood pointing away from my naked body, pulling my body outward with it. Edward touched me, wrapped his palm around the solid shaft and brushed the head with shivers-making delicacy. I exhaled and swooned. Doug pressed his mouth to mine and forced his tongue to break open my lips. I began sucking kisses from him like a baby its milk.
Douglas moved away from me, turned his head so that his mouth met Edward's. I watched them kiss and felt their excitement, my own escalating as Edward kept taking me to an edge, and then pulling me back so that he could push me to the edge again and torture me with the sensation of being about to go over. But he always pulled me back.
I became wild. I grabbed him from Doug and pulled him to me and offered myself to him as I grabbed hold of him as hard as I could and drew him to me until he was inside me, and it astonished me but I felt like I was feeling things like a woman, a very voluptuous woman, whose power lay in her ability to seduce. I felt him in me and responded to his every move. He slapped me as I came and kissed me and blew along my neck and into my ear. I held onto him tight and drilled myself into him.
We drank coffee afterwards, watched a movie, and fell asleep. It went without saying that I was going stay the night with them.
"You have a very pretty face."
"I'm always told I'm as pretty as a girl."
"You are. You ought to use make-up around your eyes. They are very beautiful. It's a shame not to highlight them."
"You think so."
"Of course. Here, let me show you. Come into our dressing room."
We were still naked. We left the coffee unfinished.
"Here, put this on," Edward commanded me, handing me a red velvet robe. It fell open on my chest, and Edward touched me on the nipple and said, bending over me, "Open your eyes wide," I did, and he outlined them with a soft black pencil. He touched my cheeks. He backed away and regarded me. "Look at her," he said, pointing me out to Doug. "A beautiful whore."
"You are a beautiful whore," Doug said taking me in his arms and beginning to dance with me as if there were music, although there was none.
"I don't know what to say," I said.
He touched my lips with his finger. "Don't say anything," he said.
When we woke, it was a gray morning. Edward pulled the cover off us and began stroking my chest and then my legs, "You have good legs," he said. "I think I read that somewhere."
"I'm sorry." I said.
"Don't be," he said. "I want to see how sexy they'll be in heels and stocking."
I was surprised at how natural it felt to walk in high heels. It was easy. It felt right.
The sound my heels made on the paths through the park excited me. Summer had come in full blast. Except for a pair of sheer nylons, my legs were naked. A pair of short jean cutaways was my grudging concession to modesty. And I knew this modesty was more provocative than calming. Lots of guys, and women, couldn't really look at me, and just stole glances. I had make-up on, and when I did, I could become intimidatingly beautiful. A few guys who thought too highly of themselves stared, whistled, and cat called. I kept my head high, my chin up and passed them by like I was crossing the Red Sea without a thought for the waves that threatened any minute to crash upon me.
"Cigarette, babe." He was a cut above the others and stretched a hand out to me offering a lighted joint.
"Sure," I said taking it and winking. I knew he was gay just from the look of him, and that he went to a gym. And I knew he knew I was, too.
"You're a beautiful girl," he said.
"You're a pretty good-looking boy," I said. He really was. I put my hand on his ass as I spoke and poked my finger under his shorts and circled around his hole. The effect was immediate. He exhaled deeply giving out a stream of pot smoke, and said, "How did you know?"
I placed his hand on my cock.
"I knew it," he whispered.
Edward was upset that I was late.
"We held lunch," he said, when I arrived.
"I'm sorry," I said. "I've never gone out like this, and crossing the park, I meet someone."
"She's going slutty on us."
I did not think of it that way. To me it seemed that I had discovered an entirely new territory that was contained within me. I had opened up what had been a dark continent, and now I began to explore it, to behold its wonders. I was an adventurer in the land of myself. When I had sex now, it was opening myself up to receive everything a copious world offered. Resistance burst. Where I had felt constrained and held back, now I felt no barrier between me and what lay on the other side of me, pressing against me, outside my skin. I was hungry for it and partook of it.
Adam Domeck recognized something in me when he saw me leaning over the bar asking Tony for a vodka and tonic. Later, I became aware of it – what he saw in me. I only experienced it when I was with him. I was somebody else when I was with him, but that somebody else was who I really am. I was so terribly removed from that. I lived inside the stories I made up.
I knew he was making his way over to me. He already had me with his eyes as he approached.
"You hide behind a screen woven of thoughts, but you have never touched what matters."
"You are Adam Domek," I said.
"Who are you," he responded.
"My name is Michael," I said. "It's funny to find you in a place like this.
"Why? A place like what?"
I was trapped.
"I think I don't know what I'm talking about."
"I bet you don't dance," he said.
I blushed.
"It's ok," he said, and took me in his arms, "You'll dance with me."
I did. Suddenly, my body was butter and slipped away from me into rhythms and postures that I pursued with delight.
We moved back to the bar. I was sweating with exhilaration. He unbuttoned my shirt and touched my soaked chest.
"You're getting hot," he said. I could not tell if he meant it as a double entendre or not.
I hope you mean that in both ways, he said,
"Is there a difference?" he said.
"You tell me," I said.
He tweaked my nipple and put his face close to mine. "There's no difference." He slid his hand down through the waist-band of my shorts and cupped my scrotum, held it like it belonged to him, and pressed his lips to mine.
"You'll stay here, tonight," he said when we got back to his loft. "I want to make sketches of you."
I became his muse and his model. Suddenly, I had no time to myself, and no say who that self was. One pose after another, one painting after another, I became somebody else. I was the image of what he wanted me to be at the moment he was drawing me.
He took me through the vertigo of his demands by stroking me gently and bringing me to the peak of desire and keeping me there. I stiffened and straightened under his hands. My breath became deep and continuous, air smoothly rising and falling through what seemed a channel running right through me. I stayed in the pose he then set me in, becoming what I was pretending to be.
"How does it feel to have abandoned your self?" Sheila said.
"I don't know what you mean," I said.
"I'm sure you do." Sheila said. "I don't know who you are anymore. You keep changing, your personality, the things you talk about, the way you talk. I'm just wondering where you are in all of this."
"I think you are jealous," I said.
"And I think you are ridiculous," Sheila said, angrily enough to let me know that I was right. She was jealous. I first saw it when I started seeing Douglas and Edward.
"You're combing your hair different," she said, as if disturbed to see any part of me she had not already seen emerging.
Now she was silent and looked at me on the edge of tears. My heart went out to her but there was nothing I could do.
"At least, come home with me now," she said.
"Of course," I said.
She sat before her dressing table mirror, pulled of her wig, and began wiping off the make up she had applied with exquisite delicacy at the beginning of the evening. Her free skin glistened.
"You're the only person I'd let see me do this."
"You've deprived me of mystery," I said.
"You won't sleep with me, will you?"
"No," I said quietly.
The sun was rising over Manhattan as I walked home from Sheila's. I had kept her up much of the night. "Lie down next to me," she cooed when she could hardly stay awake. "Take me in my sleep and take me slowly with the knocking of your cock against my prostate." And she was caressed by Slumber in his arms. I looked at her, head on the pillow, carved chest bare, eyelids like almond shells covering the soft jelly of his eyes, and I kissed him gently on the temple and left him.
I met Adam in mid-town later that afternoon.
After leaving Sheila, I went back to Adam's place, where I had been living for several years. I took a long hot bath until my skin was soft and tender, shaved my face and body, wrapped myself in soft towels and took on the feminine identity that I had pretty much been inhabiting since I started being with Adam.
Wearing a black leather mini dress, cut very low in the back and a pair of high-heeled knee-high black boots under a burgundy velvet cape, I waited hardly a minute before I saw Adam walking towards me. We got into a cab and went down to SOHO to the Upshot Gallery. A new collection of his work was being exhibited. Beside painting, he had begun to design clothing. Now his name is known for that rather than for painting.
Then he was just beginning to make the transition – and the name. Naturally he was nervous. The way he got nervous, I began to see was that he got nasty and spiteful. He would begin to pick apart everything; you couldn't talk to him. He could make a fight out of anything I said, and when I said nothing, he pounced on me for that.
I could sense it was about to start no matter what I did. I took his hand and brought it to my lips.
"They are going to like it," I said, meaning his new designs.
"You don't know what they will like. You're projecting your own anxiety. You care about whether people like what you do instead of what you are doing. The result is that you can't involve yourself in something and do it well and generously." There was no possible argument. He spoke with cold certainty and impervious authority.
Where was this coming from? Not from me. It was coming from him. He was using me to torment himself. If I were as he believed, when he became angry like this, it justified the anger and resentment that overwhelmed him when he became anxious.
We arrived glumly at the gallery on Wooster Street. It was crowded with visitors looking around. But when we entered, many recognized Adam and great applause broke out. His transformation was immediate and quite breathtaking. He became taller and compellingly handsome and welcoming. He put his arm around me and kissed my neck. I took it as his way of acknowledging that he had been abusive. It was past history, and I could feel him fully present now, and I was flooded with happiness. But later I had my own bouts with resentment.
"I liked your novel very much," Adam said, shaking hands with a lightly bearded guy in his mid-twenties, who smiled in appreciation. It was already Harvey Sandler's third novel, and he was not out of his twenties yet.
"I'm still humbled when I see your paintings."
"What did you think of the fashion designs?"
"I liked them very much. So much so that I became afraid that you'd give up art."
"Ah, but it is art, my darling; it is conceiving a series of forms, colors, themes that work around each other and then encircle and redefine the human body. It's sculpture out of fabrics rather than stone. There is tactile as well as visual perception. Sculpture is immobile; you don't touch it when you look at it. But you wear fabric. It hugs you and swirls around you." Adam smiled and swirled as if he were modeling something unseen.
Sandler laughed. Then he took my hand and kissed it. Pressing his palms together, he looked up at us, slightly bowed. and withdrew.
The show at the Upshot was a great success. Suzy Mendes wrote it up in the Times, welcomed Adam into the inner circle of important designers, and argued that what made him essential was the integrity of his work.
"I don't know what she's talking about," Adam said when I read the review to him. "And I don't really want to," he said smiling and shaking his head. "You look beautiful," he said.
I thanked him.
"That's not all," he said. "I know I give you a hard time."
I bowed my head slightly indicating that there was no need to say anything.
"Come here," he said. I put my drink down on the mantle piece and let my robe fall open as I walked toward him only in heels and underwear. I stood in a pose that combined pride and availability for a second and then knelt in front of him and took his hands and kissed his fingers one after another. He bent down and kissed me on the mouth.
A week later, we were in Venice. There was a special exhibition of Adam's work at the Biennale. At a press conference held inside the exhibition, a French journalist asked Adam if he did not feel...the journalist hesitated but then went ahead with the word...did he not feel guilty to indulge himself in apolitical compositions and a pricey fashion line?
"If you like my work, you like my work. If you do not like it, no pretentious tangle of words explaining, defending, analyzing it is going to bring you any nearer to it, but only to ideas that can exist on their own."
The journalist took offense at this answer; felt scorned and diminished. She wrote that Adam was aloof and elitist, that the kind of work...if you could call it work...when you think of the millions who do real, grinding, tedious, weary, tormenting work...that the kind of work Adam did was an offense to those people, who were struggling, without recognition and glamor, to get through their days.
"I really don't want to have to deal with that much resentment ...and to have my work causing it... justifying, resentment. It sets up a bad current around me."
I understood what he meant. Often my actions provoked responses entirely at odds with what I had expected. It was as if a perverse imp stood between me and somebody else and distorted my every emanation until I sabotaged every intention that made life bright to me. That was something in the past. I took his hand and kissed it. He smiled.
"Empty your mind of all that," I said gazing into his eyes, beseeching. I stroked his neck and blew in his ear. My breathing deepened and so did his. I pulled off his shirt and pressed my chest to his and pressed my mouth to his and drew all lifelessness out of him and made his body vibrate with joy, and, as it did, feel my own greet him with delight.
He smelled my neck,
"You are wearing perfume," he said.
"Do you like it?" I answered.