Greg Baxter - A Preparation for Death

Within and around the edges of the pattern of my working day, I foist nothing upon the accidental nature of the world. My observations stand without the imposition of plots or meaning: I am not interested in fictions. I have used up all the characters in my head. They are all at the beach. They have walked off the pages of all my old stories and gone to Mexico. A lot of them swam out in the ocean and are dead. Those who remain hang around a bar and watch the sea all day. They move from job to job. The sun boils them. They fuck each other in dirty motel rooms. They go drinking and fall into gutters, where they lie unconscious for days, and in the rainy seasons, when the streets flood and the mud from the green mountain slops down like a fat brown tongue, their bodies float around like empty aluminium cans. This is the end of them, the Giudecca in the hell of the free self.

After class, the students and I head down to the Hop House on Parnell Street, a sadly decorated Korean sushi restaurant and sports bar with cheap pitchers of beer. It is full of young Korean dudes with freakishly beautiful girlfriends, and, worryingly, an increasing number of Dublin hipster types, the gig-goers in hats and T-shirts and beards and jittery on E or amphetamines.

The drive home is up the same streets I came down fifteen hours before, empty but for taxis. I run all the red lights. I come home and fall into the couch.

From out of this paralysed universe comes the concussive reality of women. These days I am up to my neck in luck.

I hate a surly and gloomy spirit that slides over the pleasures of life and seizes and feeds upon its misfortunes. [Montaigne]

I am annoyed that my essays serve the ladies only as a public article of furniture, an article for the parlour. This chapter will put me in the boudoir. [Montaigne]

I carry, through the static tableau of my everyday routine, memories of bodies and the noises they make, the positions they prefer, the intricate texture of beauty — moles, bellybuttons, breastbones, fat and skinny nipples, wet cunts, irises, teeth, callused bottoms of feet, smudged make-up, freckles on noses, toenails and fingernails.

I like women who are so pale they can disappear in white bedsheets. Undressing them in my bedroom, they glow white in the street light. When we wake, they are the colour of cold mornings. I like them falsely demure — they blush at the mention of things they desire, and things they do.

My former housemate Elísabet — who is something of a sensation in her country, and only dates men half her age — writes very beautifully about sex because she is not afraid of what people will think. She says an orgasm is like a hand that reaches up inside her, grasps her by the spine, and shakes her like a rattle, an inch away from the death of one self and the rebirth of another. I have no capacity to write beautifully about sex. Often I am battling through the swamp of a dozen pints, the smoke of twenty cigarettes, and no real sleep for days. The exercise is nauseating, and I feel like the young Orwell working in a small, hot, Paris kitchen.

There is a blonde named Juliette who comes three or four times during one long act of fucking. She can come just from humping with clothes on, even giving head. She lectures in physics to undergraduates. She got her PhD for something that did not interest her, and now she is wandering disinterestedly through post-doc research, and resents academia. She has very bright brown eyes and does not hold her drink.

Olivia, a junior doctor, has a problem with falling when she gets drunk, and likes tequila. She gives head with the enthusiasm you only find in good Catholics, and she, who usually doesn’t sleep with men she likes for months, lies around in the mornings wondering what has happened to her morals. She is nearly thirty but could pass for nineteen. This creates a funny incongruity — she is always saying things that seem too wise for her years. Because she works very hard in a competitive field that prizes success at the expense of others, she is also slightly mean-spirited. She sees right through romance and does not trust men. She has straight brown hair that she is proud of, and a wide mouth. She is enormously pretty but looks uncannily like a cousin of mine, which makes me feel uncomfortable. She comes with an almost unnoticeable shiver.

Allison, who is in public relations, has long brown hair that she can wear in a hundred different styles, and large eyes — so large and sad they are the first thing you notice — in a face that narrows sharply toward her mouth. She writes short stories on the weekends. They are all about people who can’t talk to each other. When she kisses, she throws her head back in what I would call premature ecstasy, with her eyes open, and moans. She is very funny and quiet until she gets three or four pints inside her, and then she starts marching down the middle of busy streets telling men to fuck off. When she is underneath me she is always squirming away — it is like some National Geographic article in which the female is only subdued if the male can penetrate her. She tells me I am hurting her in a weak and crying voice but if I stop or slow down she looks at me as though I’ve ruined the moment.

Then Evelyn. Evelyn is the type of woman who has read all of Proust, whom I have only read one book of, but who also loves television shows about deformities and surgeries, which she can watch while eating dinner — while I have to look away and make loud noises. I am in love with her, but she has as little interest in hearing it as I have in saying it. Evelyn is afraid of having sex in bright light, and is always covering her naked body. She has a beautifully shaped and scentless cunt. It is perfectly symmetrical and inconspicuous. It is small but gets extremely wet. I crawl between her legs and admire her. I begin to lick her slowly and heavily, then quicken. I have my hands on her ass, lifting her to me like a giant delicious plate of food. When she is breathing quickly and moving around a little, I slip my middle and index fingers inside her. She begins to moan and almost writhe. A few minutes later I move both fingers into her ass. This is one way she comes. I press it past the quivering muscle, there is a sensation of a pop, then empty heat. Then slowly, all the way, I push inside her. And now I am licking her as fast and as lightly as I can, and sucking her clitoris. Her orgasms are like quiet emergencies — she whispers that it’s on the way, repeats herself three or four times, convulses for a few moments, moaning Oh God or something like it, then grabs and holds herself with all her fingers pressed flat and hard on her cunt. And then I climb up her long body and if my dick has gone flat it goes hard the moment it’s in contact with her. She is ten times more beautiful being fucked than doing anything else, because it is only being fucked that you may witness all of her. She is too inscrutable to gauge at any other time. This is a woman who blushes when she is asked to speak in public but likes to watch herself giving head in mirrors. She has conveniently mounted a narrow mirror into the wall beside her bed, and we often fuck sideways so both of us can watch. Sometimes when I am on top of her, her head slips over the edge and she watches herself upside down. She likes to be fucked with great energy, which she absorbs in near silence. When there is no mirror, just us, and I am on top of her, she keeps her eyes half-closed for the most part, staring at nothing. I gaze at her face. Slowly she lifts her eyes and looks at me, and does not look away. After I have come inside her and rolled exhaustedly off, we lie close to each other for a few minutes without speaking, and then she asks how long before we go again.

A few others have come and gone. A very small girl — just barely five foot — who is sweet and emotionally fragile came only when I fucked her from behind and immobilized all her limbs. A receptionist, aged thirty-nine, could not come at all — never once in her life, she said. A few came from intercourse, but only when they were on top and motoring at full speed. One came only when I made her talk about fucking other women — she is bisexual, only twenty-three. One night we met a girlfriend of hers at a bar. We got drunk and walked around the city looking for a taxi.When we found shadows or stretches of emptiness I would kiss one of them, or both of them, and they might kiss each other while I put my hand down the front of one’s jeans. We got a taxi and pretended to be normal for twenty minutes, talking about this and that. We went to my friend’s place — straight to her bedroom, which was filthy and smelled of mildew — and they both knelt down in front of me and took turns sucking my dick. Periodically they licked each other’s mouths. Then I put them on the bed. I fucked one from behind while she kissed the other. Then I fucked the other on her back while the first straddled her face. The first became faint and lay to one side, but kept one leg under the other’s head, so that I could watch the other lick the first’s clit while I worked two fingers in and out of her cunt. We all came together, or pretended to.