Francis Levy - Erotomania - A Romance

Sometimes you try to help people with their addictions by encouraging abstention or by just letting them wear themselves out. However, when Monica wanted something, a team of wild horses was not going to stop her. Threatening to abstain from sex with her was not going to work. She knew I couldn't resist her, and all I can say is not a day went by without some new paraphilia appearing in our sex lives. As far as sex was concerned, 1 knew there was nothing I could do to make her amend her behavior. So rather than trying to prevent her from acting out, I became her enabler. I decided to give her as much of the mixture of abstract expressionism and unbridled sexuality as she wanted, in the hope that one day she would reach what in the recovery movement they call "a bottom." A bottom is a low point; some people lose all their friends, some people get sick, some have a near-death experience. I was going to have to lie back and enjoy Monica's descent because base camp was nowhere in sight.

At one point, Monica jerked me off on a painting by the Japanese minimalist, Yoshi Yokoshida, that was showing in a gallery in Providence. We were about to be booked on a charge of desecrating private property when Yokoshida, in town for a retrospective, intervened on our behalf. We were released when he told the police my ejaculations were a serendipitous addition to his work. The experience, however, left an indelible impression on my mind. After having sex on or near a number of De Koonings, Rothkos, Nolands, a Kandinsky, and several Rauschenbergs, 1 had a new idea. "You know, honey, there are lots of starving artists who would be willing to have you roll all over their freshly painted canvases if you paid them a few bucks…."

"Do you think they would take money? Don't you think they would regard that as selling out?"

"They wouldn't feel they were selling out taking money for you to roll naked in acrylics. For them it would just be another experience-perhaps even a source of inspiration for new work."

As everyone knows, Soho, the former home of New York's art world, has been turned into a gigantic shopping mall that rivals the best that New Jersey has to offer in terms of barren commercialism. Most of the starving artists now live in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, and it was there that we made the acquaintance of the brothers Ivan and Dimitri Lermontov. They weren't exactly abstract expressionists. Being Russian, they had a nostalgia for the early years after the Russian Revolution and before the advent of Stalin, when the esthetic and political avant-gardes were in sync. They loved the geometry of the Constructivists and Malevich and evinced their obsession with the square, for example, by doing renderings of linoleum floors. Still, they had no problem with Monica and me fucking our brains out on their huge freshly painted canvases. They didn't even ask for money. Even though they were inspired by an altogether different movement, they subscribed to the abstract expressionist idea that the painting was a memento of an act that once occurred. Instead of money they wanted the right to exhibit what they called "the remembrances of things past." They wanted to immortalize our modernist fucks, and we weren't averse to being their Davids.

At first I had a little trouble convincing Monica. Ivan and Dimitri weren't pure abstract expressionists. It was a little like trying to give coke to a methamphetamine addict. But once she got used to the feel of rolling in their paints, she wouldn't have her art sex any other way. This was our real introduction to the heyday of the Russian avant-garde. Monica never had much interest in words, but I became interested in a few of the poets of the era-in particular, Mayakovsky, who was a great favorite of the Lermontov brothers. The age of Russian artistic freedom was short-lived, however, and Stalinist socialist realism ushered in an era of artistic repression.

If our energies had been confined to fucking our brains out on the Lermontov's canvases, we wouldn't have had a problem. It was what occurred when we had finished working with the brothers that bothered me. Our couplings in Williamsburg were the most memorable of our whole relationship, but instead of satiating us, they made us want more and more. I was beginning to feel my years. After fucking Monica up the ass on a succession of white squares reminiscent of Malevich's White on White, I could have gone home and watched some television. But Monica, the instigator, kept seeking out higher levels of pleasure, and I was never able to resist her scent.

The art-world sex was like a powerful chain reaction that couldn't be stopped. Even though we always got the last two seats at the back of the plane on our trips home, we still ran into trouble. The only thing you're explicitly not allowed to have in your mouth on an airplane is a cigarette, but most airlines don't look kindly on blowjobs, even if they're done underneath a blanket. The sight of Monica's bobbing head and my mouth stuffed with her fingers to muffle my cries, resulted in some tense exchanges with the cockpit.

General Shapiro had created a monster. After one of our trips-I don't remember which; the past has become a blur of canvas, acrylic paint, and cunt in my mind-I came home determined to do something about our relationship. Monica might not have reached her bottom, but I had. After all, I was a man of the theater. I had a professional identity for which it was important to maintain at least a veneer of respectability. I still considered myself a member of society. What had happened in our apartment building was happening all over again. Our sex was resulting in our being ostracized. I could have pointed my finger at the repression of American society; I could have said it was like the Salem Witch hunts, or the McCarthy trials; I could have compared Monica and me to the Hollywood Ten; I could have looked at Monica as an Alger Hiss-type martyr, but I realized that-when an eight-year-old flying on the same flight cries out, "Mommy, why does that lady have a penis in her mouth?" — it was Monica and I who had to change.

I knew we never should have quit Shapiro in the first place. The cement bunker was only a band-aid. It had been a wonderful solution, but it wasn't going to solve all our problems. You can't live in a state of total soundproof isolation, and you can't live on a total Chinese take-out diet. In addition, I'm basically a social creature. I need more than the leering eyes of a Chinese delivery boy for friendship. How was I going to get us back into treatment? As far as Monica was concerned, she was happy. My plan of enabling her and letting her spiral to a bottom had obviously backfired. She was more addicted than ever. I wasn't going to be able to conquer such a problem on my own. I needed a power greater than myself. I needed General Shapiro, but Monica wasn't going to take kindly to an interventionespecially one performed by Shapiro, whose crude methods and blunt truths she still claimed to despise. Shapiro was also a bit of a prima donna. You don't get to be the highest-ranking Jewish marriage counselor in the history of the United States Army without having run the gauntlet. Shapiro's climb up the ladder of the military couples counseling establishment had obviously hardened him, but also made him cranky and erratic at times. Who knew what would happen when I called to ask for help? He'd promised he would see us anytime we needed him, but finding an available hour with someone whose time was so coveted would not be easy. He'd have us over a barrel. He'd find the hour, but it would be a sacrifice on his part and he'd let us know it. There was going to be pressure on Monica to change, and Monica didn't respond well to coercion.

I wasn't looking forward to seeing the sneer that always crossed Monica's face when I mentioned Shapiro's name, nor was I looking forward to the stream of invective that would pour out of her mouth. She had nothing nice to say about the man, although in her more contemplative moments she admitted he'd helped us. After all, she wouldn't have become addicted to abstract expressionism if it weren't for him, and she wouldn't have attained a state of orgasm that made tantric sex look like Puritan love at Plymouth Rock.