Sand - 2

By Jim Chaffee

Besides Japanese food, her favorite, Clarice introduces me to other cuisines I know only marginally, Thai, Vietnamese, Indonesian, Indian. She eats no meat, only fish and shellfish, tofu, and vegetables, and convinces me to do the same. Eating meat, she contends, makes people stink.

She takes me to galleries I didn’t know existed. We attend staged performance art, incomprehensible spectacles laced with pent-up sex spewed at the audience in unexpected fury. Our evenings end at bars crowded with creatures in spiked, wildly colored or inky black hair, white faces, black lips, tattooed and pierced, smoking organic cigarettes and drinking Sazerac cocktails and absinthe, deliberating art and literature and films and sex and listening to sequences of monotonous electronic bleats.

For several months we are always together without so much as kissing, though eventually we begin to touch, hold hands, hug.

I don’t miss sex. With the exception of youthful undergraduate forays into the demimonde of liberal arts seeking aggressive women willing to seduce me, mostly unsuccessful, I have spent the bulk of my life a celibate. There was a girlfriend in graduate school, a fellow candidate for the Doctorate of Engineering, mortified of sex.

The last I’d heard, she lived alone and devoted herself to writing obscure papers and teaching.

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I don’t understand what Clarice sees in me. Compared to her, my life drags along in tedium.

We sit on her balcony late at night. She lights a joint and demands we smoke it together. I tried pot in the past but never cared for it; the disorientation left me immobilized and afraid. I prefer the steadiness of reality clearly distinguished from my interior thoughts, but with Clarice I find I welcome the permeability of the boundary between inner and outer.

Beside me on the sofa, wearing her feather in one ear and a shark’s tooth in the other, she leans back and brings her bare feet to my lap, rubbing my groin with their soles. I watch her feet twist and bend as though endowed with extra joints, moving with the expertise of someone who has perfected a technique over years of practice. I lean in to kiss her but she averts her face and tells me to be still. She sits up and strokes my member through my pants, then frees it and sheathes it with a condom, never touching it with her bare hands. Leaning into my lap, she sucks until I reach orgasm.

*****************************

It’s morning and the sobbing wakes me. I go to the living room and find Clarice crying. I ask what’s wrong but she shakes her head. I cancel my classes and sit with her, asking again what’s wrong. She answers that she doesn’t know. I hold her but the tears continue unabated for an hour or more. When she stops, she tells me to take her shopping.

I buy her clothes and gifts and afterward take her to a favorite restaurant. We drink heavily and arrive at her apartment a little drunk. She takes off her clothes and I see her naked for the first time, a waif except for the pendulous breasts hanging like filled balloons sagging to the sides, a wide gulf of bony chest between them. I kiss the dusky areoles, giant discs ending in slender nipples so long they could be fingertips.

With her mouth she rolls on a condom, pushing me back onto the sofa and climbing on top. She grips my penis with the muscles of her vagina and massages it until I reach orgasm, all the time watching, mute and impassive, her face a blank mask.

She moves into my house. We sleep in separate rooms.

*****************************

Our life together does not become routine. Though she loves to tell incredible stories about her past, her present remains a mystery. As a topic, her work is off limits. Visiting or calling her office is prohibited.

Her days start early in the afternoon and often end late in the evening. I never know when she will be home, but it creates no problem for us. As a professor, my own schedule is forgiving, allowing me to go in for a few hours three days a week.

Her private therapy sessions and her group therapy sessions, also off limit topics, are kept as religiously as if her psychiatrist held a sacerdotal office. She takes seventy-five milligram pamelor capsules under prescription with the gravity of a sacrament.

We practice no devised sexual routine. Instead, she appears naked at her whim, telling me to get it up and fuck her. Those are the words she uses. She does not respond to my efforts, no matter what I try, but controls her vaginal muscles with such expertise she drives me to fast, powerful orgasms.

Refusing to kiss on the mouth, she will not touch any part of me with her lips except for oral sex through a layer of latex. She is careful never to touch my naked penis with any part of her body, including her hands. We keep condoms in bowls scattered around the house.

She permits me to kiss her body, but at first will not allow me to eat her pussy. In time she relents, but in the beginning only with a dental dam.

Up close, the lips of her vagina open to a minute shock of livid pink set against the burnt umber flesh of her inner thighs.

I learn to talk about sex with the same vulgar expression she uses because it pleases her.

*****************************

We’re at the counter in one of her favorite Japanese restaurants eating a la carte sushi and sashimi. I ask her to marry me. The question pops out of a sudden deep longing for her and is as unexpected to me as to her, but I mean it. I realize I need to be with her.

She ignores me, pretending she has not heard. Instead she deftly maneuvers a seaweed roll filled with golden fish eggs to her mouth and bites through half of it.

I repeat the question. She turns to me with a quizzical look as if I suffer from some mental defect. A bit of egg has smeared against the corner of her mouth. The remainder of the fish roll follows her eyes, hovering between us pinched in the ends of chopsticks by her long, slender fingers.

She cries all the while I drive back to the house. I try to comfort her, but when we arrive she pushes me away and retreats to her room. I listen to her sob until I fall asleep.

Early the next morning I hear her rustling in the kitchen, making coffee and singing in a quiet, happy tone. She notices me standing in the doorway staring in amused wonder and she smiles, maybe for the first time.

We’re going to my office, she says. Get dressed.

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Sand - 2

By Jim Chaffee