Nectar in a Sieve
I was exhausted. I had stayed up till four last night and gotten up again at six in the morning, two hours later, so I could open up the restaurant at six thirty. Now it was one in the afternoon. I was near my stop on the bus and yawning ferociously while still feeling the urge to remain in the waking world. I was full of longing. The air around me crackled with unsatisfied desire.
I pulled the cord and walked to the exit door.
"You're not getting off," a man said. He was not much older than me, and you could tell by his looks and the way he dressed that he was hot for guys.
"I'm not?" I said smiling.
"No," he said. "Sit down." I did. "That's better," he said, took my hand as if to shake it but held it as he smiled into my eyes.
"Where are we going?" I asked.
"Wherever we want to," he said, and kissed me before I could resist even though we were on a public bus.
"But we get off soon," he said breaking the kiss, and this time, he pulled the cord.
We got off the bus at Seventy-second Street and Broadway.
"This way," he said, took me by the arm, and headed us towards the river. His building stood just off West End Avenue.
"Get undressed," he said, once we had come into the bedroom.
I took off all my clothes, feeling my perfection as I exposed myself. It felt like a dream. I twisted, slithered, elongated myself.
"Lie down," he said, and began stroking me until I fell asleep with a sweet hard-on.
Looking into his eyes as I opened mine made me feel so far away.
He held me in his arms and moved inside me with infinite slowness. I felt his warm breath on my neck and with every bit of myself I yielded to him.
"Yes," he whispered, aroused by my surrender.
I felt his arousal and it thrilled me. I melted into him.
"You belong to me," he said. "I own you."
"You possess me," I said. "I want to be yours. I need to be."
He kissed me, grinding his open mouth into mine and filling me.
Slowly he undulated in and out of me touching my lightning rod every time, making me glow and then fragment into the thousand lights that fall from a luminous arc in my mind. It flared and then dissolved as the next chromatic wave covered the shore I had become.
Each time he inched back into me, he touched my tongue with his, embraced mine with his, and then pulled away as he arched himself out of me, each time renewing my desire to feel him come into me.
I moaned and sighed and groaned and stared into his eyes so intensely it could only be I was giving my eyes to him. I felt his take their place in the sockets that had held mine and that yearned for him to fill them.
I smiled from the center of my body. He wrapped his hand around my branch and then played a light tattoo on it with his fingertips. I writhed as we came and fell exhausted into joyful embraces.
All the next day, at work, I felt him like a happy shadow inside me.
She would not have understood even if she had given me the time to explain. But it was not like her to do that. Instead of reaching for understanding, she preferred picking a fight. There is a certain satisfaction in feeling betrayed, a sense of righteousness. She cultivated it. But I had enough. I knew her moods and the violence she was capable of.
I took my leather windbreaker from the couch and zipped it up over my naked chest, forgetting my shirt, and bolted out the door before she even knew what had happened.
Outside the air was cold and the cold leather rubbed against my bare chest, sensitive because clean-shaven, one of her fetishes. I was through with it. The cold leather against my bare skin chaffed my cold nipples. I was punishing myself for wanting her. I was punishing myself for deserting her.
The vibrations of the phone stashed in the pocket of my jeans sent a current along my thigh. I saw it was her. I didn't answer. The wind was strong. The air was dense with the possibility of snow.
My room looked out over the river. I sat by the window and smoked a joint and watched as the storm took charge of the world. She called several times again. But I didn't answer and she stopped.
In the morning thick snow blankets transformed the streets. I would not be going to work today.
It was the first time in a long time that I awoke in my own bed. She was not next to me, and I did not have to bring her her coffee. If I wanted coffee, I had to go to the cafe on the corner. I showered and shaved and dressed. Despite the weather, I dressed lightly: jeans, moccasins, the same leather windbreaker. I wore a black t-shirt under it. No hat, no gloves. The cold is a discipline I submit to.
I sat at the counter, hunched over a black coffee wondering what I would do now. I am young. I am good-looking. I am not vain or boastful. It is a fact everyone confirms. I'm not sure how I feel about it. I have always been able to trade on my looks. I have never been without a job or a place to stay or something to eat or people who want to hang out with me or make out with me or even support me because of my looks. When I say I trade on my looks, I mean it literally, and I'm not sure what exactly I trade away. I fear it is something important, because I feel empty. I am skin-deep.
What did I trade? Something real for an idea, for a stance, for a distorted shadow of myself.
"Where are you?"
"What?"
"Where are you?"
He was smiling a friendly smile, concerned. He was not the kind of man, I felt, just by looking at him and hearing his voice, that you could brush off.
I smiled deprecatingly.
"Nowhere," I said.
"Come with me," he said. "I'll take you somewhere."
"A motorcycle," I said, once we were outside. "In this weather?"
"You have nothing to worry about. I know how to handle it."
He did.
He lived over the park. I stood by the window and looked out over the fields of snow and the boughs of the trees, brightened by the traces of snow they supported.
He took me near and kissed me. I responded giving myself in a long kiss.
"I want to watch you dance," he said.
At that moment it did not feel like it was a strange thing to say, and I danced like Salome before Herod.
"Strip as you dance. Tease me."
It was what I wanted to do.
He gazed in awe at me. I felt his gaze uncover me. It was what she withheld from me, her gaze. Who was she looking at when she was looking at me? How I had been inverted, converted into coveted images – reflections that obliterated the thing itself!
I removed my t-shirt, my boots, my jeans. I showed myself to him in black briefs, a thin bikini that clung to my hips as if from inside my skin.
He took me by the hips and drew me to him and pressed me to him as I rubbed my veiled cock against his tough jeans.
I looked up at him and groaned. He turned me round and I felt my back cupped in him. He slipped his hand under the band of my briefs from behind. I shivered. He took my balls in the palm of his hand and played the stops of my cock with his fingers. He took me to the edge but did not let me fall. I walked back into the meadow with him and lay down beside him on a bed of summer grass and slowly undressed him and caressed each newly revealed naked part of him. I breathed kisses into his mouth and stroked his chest and legs. I took him in my mouth and felt the electricity of his strength enter me and become my strength, too.
I thought of him with longing the next days when he did not call. I felt how different the place he lived in was from my shabby room by the river. We might become equals for an erotic night's pick-up, but in the world of daylight and power, I could not approach him on his terms.
I could not be anybody worth being if I could not be some sort of independent force myself. I was looking for myself. I had to find myself. I had gotten lost. Or what is worse, I had thrown myself away.
I walked up town. The night was clear; the moon, bright. I had wasted it in a movie house. Now my head was weighed down with misery. I felt the emptiness with an empty apprehension that I had fallen into a niche and would be guided by it forever. I needed rescue and despaired of it.
I'd worked in the bookstore a week, and from the beginning, the manager made me uncomfortable. He was young and slender. He wore silk ties and double-breasted suits, and he carried them gracefully. He was not conventionally handsome, but his features were compelling, and his bearing was easy but never at ease. He was reserved and showed no lack of self-esteem. It was the middle of the afternoon. He motioned me into a vestibule between the selling floor and the stockroom.
"You're fired," is all he said.
"I don't understand," I said.
"You don't need to understand."
"I'm new and I'm slow," I said, "but I'll get better once I know where everything is."
"This is not a discussion. You can pick up your check at the main office where you were hired."
He signaled with his thumb and first finger, turning his palm upwards, that I should go. I left, aching from the dismissal as if I had been slapped around.
I went home and slept. I slept for a day. I was exhausted from trying to hold two jobs. I still worked as a waiter on the Sunday breakfast shift and Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights.
Sunday afternoon, after work, I walked through the park and took the bus home the rest of the way. As the force of the motor rumbled in the seat beneath me, I daydreamed of life-changing encounters.