Francis Levy - Erotomania - A Romance

1 wasn't going to introduce something new into our routine just to take up Monica's dare. I'm not a chance-taker at heart. I've always liked getting laid, but I'm not the kind of guy who makes a grandstand play, swinging from the nearest vine like Tarzan to get the good-looking girl. In fact, it's amazing I've gotten fucked and sucked as much as I have.

Yet somehow I knew General Shapiro made sense. You didn't order in Chinese every day because of the cuisine. It wasn't that 1 just liked sticking my joint in Monica's hot honey pot; 1 didn't like anything else anymore. Cooking, which had once been an interest, was swept under the table by the sex. Good music, books, cinema and, yes, art were all falling by the wayside because of our addiction to each other's bodies. I was living proof that when you don't employ a given human capacity, it atrophies. 1 picked up our local version of Time Out, a paper called Whats Going On In Town. The museum was open on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday from ten until five and on Fridays and Saturdays from ten until eight forty-five.

"If we go on Friday at five we can get home in time to order in and fuck." I was trying to be practical. There's no sense in making culture a matter of punishment and deprivation; that takes away from its potential to be a source of pleasure. I remembered sitting through an all-female production of Henry IV Part II in Paris, Kentucky, in which the part of Prince Hal was played by a recovering sex addict who had just gotten out of rehab. The lines, spoken in a thick Southern drawl, all sounded like a waitress asking if you wanted a refill on your coffee. My need to sit through the entire performance was just the kind of compulsiveness I wanted to spare Monica. I didn't want her feeling that going to the museum was a chore or duty or something that had to be done unremittingly in order to achieve some required level of perfection.

"We're going to have to push our late-afternoon fuck back to four."

"If we go on Thursday at four we end up killing our late afternoon fuck. Then we get home too early for our evening fuck. So we have a fuck that's neither fish nor fowl."

"Is there any possibility we could have one of our fucks while we're there and another when we get home?"

"General Shapiro wanted us to try something different."

"That's why I'm suggesting it. If this art thing is a substitute for sex, it's going to turn me on." I didn't pay attention to the warning. It seemed ridiculous to be phobic about art.

US

You've probably guessed it. Monica became as addicted to art as she was to sex. The notion she could miss any exhibit was an affront. After the Indian quilts, there was the traveling show of Flemish floral design drawings and the etchings by someone who identified herself as Charles Manson's aunt-a show she forced me to fly to Detroit to see the day it opened. We started to travel around the country to see art shows, a practice that tied in nicely with my career in the musical theater. I'd been scheduled to work on an Annie in Akron. Monica arrived on a Monday a few days after the rehearsals began. Monday is the one day you have off in a rehearsal period, and for the first time 1 could see that Monica was torn. When I looked into her eyes 1 knew she wanted to fuck, the way I know a python likes to eat live rabbits. Usually she'd have my fly open and my dick in her mouth before we'd even said a word to each other, but this time she managed to get out, "I want to see the Anais Nin…." The rest of her sentence was muffled by the suction of her lips against the shaft of my prick, although any good cryptographer could have made out what she was talking about. Through the muffled sounds and groans I managed to get the idea that Monica wanted to see an exhibit of Anais Nin's letters displayed on the first floor of the Akron Museum of Modern Art.

During the reading of an exchange between Anais Nin and Henry Miller, Monica briefly lost control. You hear about elderly people who lose control of their bowels and bladder. Our little visit to the show at the Akron should have warned me. I don't think even a genius like General Shapiro could have predicted the effect art would have on Monica. Rather than helping her to sublimate her sexual instincts, art seemed to flood her, if it's possible to imagine, with even higher levels of sexual passion. It's lucky the Akron Museum of Modern Art has few visitors and in fact, relatively few works of art. Monica got down on all fours and demanded 1 fuck her like a dog in the middle of the gallery. The Akron's one female guard turned away when she saw what was transpiring. When you run an exhibit of writing by AnaTs and Henry Miller, you expect anomalous behavior, but this wouldn't be the last time art would have an explosive effect on Monica's sexuality. I looked Monica's symptoms up on the internet. Her symptoms would later evolve into something more complex, for which General Shapiro would eventually offer a different diagnosis, but at this point it seemed to me she had contracted a condition called Maecenatism, in which patients suffer from uncontrollable sexual urges when they look at paintings and other creative works. The condition is also referred to in the literature as "negative sublimation." In normal sublimation, erotic energy is turned into art. The negative form presents the reverse scenario. Art is turned back into the erotic energy that initially fueled its creation.

I liked going to museums and seeing paintings, but my reactions fell more into the realm of the kind of modulated behavior that General Shapiro was trying to lead the two of us towards. I genuinely found walking around museums with Monica to be a satisfying, relaxing new way of channeling my often anarchic and errant sexual desires-that is, for the first few moments we were together. After that, the associations became too powerful for Monica and she couldn't stop herself. I was so turned on by her being turned on that I became her inadvertent accomplice. Most museums are filled with signs that warn, "Please do not touch the works of art." At the Boise Center for Contemporary American Painting, Monica pinned me up against an erotic painting by Eric Fischl, and a show of Jackson Pollock's action paintings at the Wadsworth in Schenectady stimulated Monica to look for action, which in this case meant straddling me in the first stall of the gallery's bathroom.

When I had to go to Manhattan to meet with the agency that gets me my gigs in the musical theater, we stopped off at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Monica had by this time become addicted to modernism. She was as addicted to modernism as she was to sex and was as desperate about modernism (and sex for that matter) as any crack or heroine addict is for drugs. Abstract expressionism was particularly a problem for her. The dripping techniques and the emphasis on action obviously touched those parts of the brain that generate feelings of pleasureand the prospect of seeing Jackson Pollock's Autumn Rhythm, an enormous paint-spattered canvas, sent her into a complete paroxysm of desire. As we walked up the huge central staircase to the second floor, she started to grab at my testicles. Then she dug her hand into my pants. As I've said, all I need is for Monica to be in the vicinity. I can get a hard-on just having her near, but when she fondles my dick and balls and sticks her finger up my ass as she did when we approached the last few steps, my crotch begins to look like a spacious tent on a camp site. The sight of the actual painting, with its streak of yellow, made her whisper urgently, "You've got to do it to me right here, right now"

"What?"

She opened her mouth wide.

"Pee."

She dragged me by the hand. There's a little garden in back of the museum, and in front of a group of horrified mothers who covered their children's eyes, Monica got down on her knees and demanded I splatter her face with urine, the way Jackson Pollock had splattered his canvases with paint.