Richard Sharon - Diary of a Lover

Our bodies were lubricated with our own oils, her arms clamped desperately around me, nails raking my back, her warm mouth murmuring broken sobs of love into mine, the wet, squishing sound from between her legs as I moved up and on her and pushed hard and fast, pushing and pushing until at last she was over the edge and on her way again, departing her envelope for a world of her own, filled with inner sensations so intense that I was aware once more of how lonely an orgasm is. But in her wild, uncaring moment of loneliness she cried for my sperm, begged for it in deep, throaty gasps. And moving quick and full, I came to my own moment of loneliness, giving it to her in a prolonged explosion that I had been saving for months, years, only for her; it left me weak and exhausted.

The sheets were damp and cold with our sweat and the juices of our love. My body became sticky against Susan's. I hadn't wanted to come inside of her. "What if you get pregnant?" I panted, still out of breath.

"Shhh," she whispered, her hand stroking pure love into my back and dripping hair. "Shhh, put your head on my breast."

I moved down and took the moist softness of her against my cheek. Her hand moved, gently pushing her nipple, still dark and swollen, into my mouth. I felt a content, a peace to blissful that it seemed unreal.

We slept.

When we awakened it was mid-afternoon, and immediately we started to live our life together. We sat in bed reading the Sunday comics and I told Susan how, not too many years before, Aleta from the Prince Valiant strip had been the principal figure in my masturbatory fantasies. We laughed, because in retrospect it was so absurd.

We drove to Susan's apartment and loaded into my car most of her clothes and other things that she might need. I had the same curiosity about her apartment that she had shown about mine, and she confessed that she had thought of inviting me up for coffee many times but was afraid. Her place was older than mine, but was pretty much as I had imagined. While it was small, and furnished by the landlord, she had carved her personality deeply into it with good wall prints, bookshelves supported rather precariously by wine bottles, and a multitude of plants and flowers in neatly arranged pots, she so loved having living things about her. I promised that we would come back for the rest after school on Monday, and we drove to Grisson's on Van Ness Avenue for dinner, our only meal of the day. Susan wanted to cook, but neither of us had much in the way of groceries, and we were too tired to start shopping.

Back at home, we lay naked on the couch, listening to Haydn string quartets, and Susan told me about her other men, not because I had asked her but because she wanted me to know.

The first time, she was a senior in high school. She had had too much to drink at a party and her date, a football hero, had practically raped her on the front seat of his car. She didn't even remember how it had happened, except that it had hurt a lot and he had messed her panties and dress with his short, stubby cock.

When she was a sophomore in college she met a senior majoring in philosophy, whom she dated for several months. He was kind, intelligent, and entertaining, and aside from feeling her breast he never asserted himself. Finally, when his roomie transferred in mid-semester, she slept with him. He was selfish in bed, working her up to a certain state of excitement and then having his own orgasm. He didn't seem to be aware that there was any more to it, and Susan wasn't too sure herself, but she didn't mind because he was very good to her and she enjoyed his company. He had an annoying habit of asking her to suck him, but the idea was repugnant to her. She had tried once, out of compassion for him, but he wasn't as faithful about washing his genitals as he was about his hands and face. She almost gagged, and couldn't go through with it. She walked out and never saw him again.

Susan had dated scores of boys and men, but those were the only ones she had ever cared about to let do anything but kiss her or feel her breasts. A girl friend who used to sleep at her house had taught her how to masturbate when she was fifteen. They would lock her bedroom door and finger fuck each other until they both came. They tried tying on top of each other and rubbing, but were never able to have an orgasm that way. Once she had learned how, Susan masturbated often, usually in bed, and usually lying on her stomach, which made her orgasms more, intense, when she pressed herself into the mattress. She sometimes fantasized about Hollywood stars, but seldom about anybody she actually knew. One day she found out that her favorite masturbation figure, a big he-man type, was as queer as a three-dollar bill. She was crushed about it for weeks.

"Do you think that's a scarlet past?" she asked.

"I wouldn't exactly call it scarlet," I said. "Maybe slightly pink."

"I wonder why I never wanted to use my mouth on anybody before you."

"Because you were looking for me, but I wasn't there yet," I said.

"Sucking is a healthy and normal instinct of loving that we foolishly sublimate as we grow up. But some women, usually women of great sensitivity, like you, need an emotional attachment, and you never had that kind of feeling for the other men you've slept with."

"What you did to me with your tongue, from, behind?"

"Yes?"

"I wanted to do it to you, but I was afraid."

"Of what I might think?"

"I guess. I've never wanted to do that before, either. I never even thought about it before."

I folded her into me. "We have time, baby, time for everything. You can do whatever you want to me, no matter how unsanitary you used to think it was. Because it's us now, your body and mine, and there's no such thing as dirty, no such thing as you can't, no such thing as shame or embarrassment. That's all over with, now."

"Can I fart anytime I want? she asked.

"Sure," I laughed, "but try to keep your ass out of my face when you're doing it."

"I promise," she said solemnly.

I awoke Monday morning to the aroma of hot coffee and cinnamon toast. Susan was already dressed for school, bright and perky, cleaning a few dirty dishes in the kitchen.

We had breakfast and talked about the new wave of New York Jewish writers spewing out plays and bestsellers like corn from the husking machine, establishing Jews as the country's new intellectual elite. Although it was true that almost half of American Jewry lived in New York and environs, Susan and I had both felt a sense of detachment from their writings. None of it seemed relevant to the way we thought or felt. Their world was distant and isolated from us. Like ants in a kitchen sugar jar, their myopic preoccupation with their immediate surroundings led them into a false assumption that the sugar jar was the kitchen.

We both were third generation, thoroughly assimilated Americans. We knew about as much Yiddish, learned from our parents in bits and pieces, as any Irish nightclub comedian. Never in our lives had either of us tasted anti-Semitism.

Religion had fascinated me, and in addition to my sparse bar-mitzvah training I had read a great amount of all of the major religions, comparing as I went. My general conclusion was that all religions, Judaism included, were ancient bullshit upon which institutions were founded which now existed simply for the purpose of propagating their own existence. Their reason for being was that they were there to be. How difficult it was for mankind, from his little dot in the back acres of the cosmos, to look up and say, "I am alone. I am here due to a combination of accident, chance, and probability, and I am all there is."

I was an atheist, and Susan believed in what she called a Universal Force, but not in a personal God or in any organized religion.