Unknown - Posed For Pleasure

“In the example shown-for example-we did not know what specific design would result, but we knew, generally speaking, how it was formзd, what its overall size and configuration would be, how long it would take for the computer to create it, and so on.

“So that the accident exists in here.”

And~ he taps his forehead.

“The accident lies in Our wonder and astonishment at the beauty of that which we have created! “The computer wiz who programmed the thing was no less impressed than were you, ladies and gentlemen.

“There was no accident in the means or the medium! “The computer is what is is, the program, the display screen, the internal circuitry are what they are, following the rules of electronics, the rules of the program-all the rules that apply physically, without error.

“Indeed, the only accident possible to the process itself would consist of electro-mechanical failure, which did not occur.

“But. That specific design was not planned, not predictable, was, with respect to its creator-meaning, specifically, the guy who ran the program-and to you as well, an accident.

“On a very trivial scale, we could say that the unimaginable has occurred.

“We could no more predict that pattern and its effect upon us than we can next week’s lottery numbers.

“Accident.

“If the motivation of the creative process is informed inquiry, then whenever the answer is different from that we anticipated, we rightly call that an accident, one of the major thrills-and quite often major disappointments-in the creative process.

“It is a thrill if the accident is aesthetically pleasing or acceptable, a disappointment if it is not.

“So that it takes a certain courage to…

Yeah, right, Armand, it takes a certain courage to do what she is doing, Jessica, watching him, tells herself.

It takes a certain courage to hang in there while he does nothing for her, given that he could do it all for her, could make it all happen for her.

She has imagination-a great imagination!

And all the elements of reality are present for her to create her masterpiece of manipulation.

But it’s not happening.

The book is untouchable, the painting nonextant.

Which leaves her-where?

Which leaves her, essentially, the plaything of a great man.

Yes, she could sleep with him. Yes, she could have his telephone number. But no, she cannot be involved in any way with the book, and about the sacred activity itself, she dare not even ask.

It will come when it comes, in due course, she tells herself. She has to believe that it is there within him, bubbling, boiling, building pressure.

So that; sooner or later-and probably sooner rather than later-it will erupt.

Armand will explode in a spate of release of pent-up creativity.

What’s wrong with a fourth series of explorations of the feminine mystique-her feminine mystique will do quite nicely, thank you?

So what if there have been three of these already?

Is the world grown tired of Christmas?

How many years have those same tired Charlie Brown specials run on TV?

In the movies, what is the Friday the Thirteenth series up to now?

She could go on and on, for heaven’s sake!

So yes, Armand, you can damn well do yet another series of paintings based on the woman you’re currently sleeping with, who just happens to be Jessica.

All night, she stayed with him, slept with him.

Except that there was not all that much sleep involved.

He could not seem to get enough of her.

He was like some twenty year old in his prime and in love-even though she knows that he loves only his inner muse, the spark of his creativity.

He made a meal of her ass hole, of her ass.

He fucked her in the ass, in the mouth, in the cunt, what seemed to her like over and over, practically non-stop.

Because when he wasn’t fucking, he was building up to it, devouring her with eye and hand and mouth, turning her this way and that, tasting her, exploring her.

And okay, he flopped her around like she was a rag doll, treating her like a piece of meat. And okay, she can even accept that his enthusiasm was for his own sexuality rather than for herself, perhaps even a macho thing-except that, in her experience, macho was customarily reserved by men for when there were other men around.

But whatever, the fact of the matter is that he was persistent and potent-in other words, a real stud.

A real stud, Armand, that’s you, she tells him in her mind, looking down there, where he is driving home point after point to his audience, now become practically disciples, some of them, she would guess.

And only after she left him that morning, he on his way to the gym-to which, he assured her, Steve had not yet returned-only when she was once again by herself, on her way back to class, did she realize what he was doing.

Of course he was a fucking stud!

He was a stud because, at the moment, he couldn’t be anything else!

His creativity was, is blocked, and so that was all he was capable of doing, his only means of expressing himself, faute de mieux, for want of something better.

He was Patton between wars, Alexander the Great between campaigns-a ball of energy put on hold and periodically discharging all that excess power by other means.

She was going to inspire him? Bullshit!

If anything, she was in the way, providing him cathexis and thus delaying the crisis which would cause him to erupt, volcano-like, in tremendous creativity.

No, no, she tells herself; that’s giving her way too much credit. She is arbitrary in his life, is incidental to it, is merely something to help pass the time, nothing more.

In time, he could grow to depend upon her-but if he did, it would be as a part of his private life, or even all of it.

For whatever that’s worth, she appends.

Because Armand’s private life means virtually nothing to him. One look at his living conditions is sufficient to prove that.

The man has no private life!

Even his most significant sexual activity-she cannot believe that what they do when alone really means all that much to him-takes place, as it were, in performance.

Because Armand is no novice to group sex; she could tell by what happened over at Steve’s, at Armand’s instigation and virtual insistence.

So that even his sex life is public, in the sense that he brings his full image to bed with him in a bed not his own, whether that of Steve, of his agent (Jessica has seen but never met her), or of some wealthy patroness of the arts.

And she? What is she to him, then?

His groupie, is what.

Yes, she is nothing more to him than the representative of all those ditsy douchebags who ooh and aah at the sight of him.

Not that he is all that hard to look at; but neither is he a matine idol.

Or perhaps it is his greatness of soul which causes his admirers to stop and stare, as though he radiates some aura, some perpetual glow of creativity, a sort of incarnation of the prime creator, and not very far removed from the original at that.

Am I lucky or unlucky? Jessica asks herself, chiding herself for asking, for admitting to herself that, at this stage of the game (Her game? His?), she has come to depend on luck.

But what the hell, why not? she reasons.

Irene depended on it, as, no doubt, did Darlene, to a lesser degree.

Hell, she reminds herself, Irene didn’t even depend on it; it was something that simply happened to her, unbooked for and almost certainly, initially, at least, unappreciated, unrecognized for what it was, the chance of a lifetime.

Certainly, the melancholy figure of ‘Irene I’ didn’t have a fucking clue.

“… with the same surprise and delight as any of you, ladies and gentlemen! “And I beg of you not to look upon this as false modesty or ill-disguised braggadocchio, but rather as a confession of genuine humility in the face of that over which, frankly, I had no appreciable control.