Francis Levy - Erotomania - A Romance

"1'm really excited about this." She held up the book. "I'm just loving it, just reading the names. The way he goes into the lives of the painters and lets you see what d'ya call it, lets yuh see about all the painters that came before."

"You mean he gives you the historical context for the rise of abstract expressionism."

"Yeah, how did you know?" she asked, playing dumb so she could indulge her desire to be cut down.

"You're a dumb bitch and a cunt. Just remember that. You don't have a brain in your head. All you're good for is a good hard fucking." Like magic, my words caused her to throw the sheet off. She spread her legs and started playing with herself again, only this time it wasn't a prelude to talk.

"Come over heah and give me a taste of your big hard cock, sailor." As I lowered myself onto her and shoved my dick into her hot pussy, she let out a cry whose resonance 1 hadn't heard since Stratford, Ontario, where the actress playing Jocasta in a production of Sophocles' Oedipus Rex had let out an animal utterance that sent a shiver down my spine. The only difference with Monica was that hers was a cry of joy, though its shrillness made it seem like anguish.

In the meanwhile, even though 1 had stopped drinking after my first day of inebriation, and even though my qualification, as they say in the program, only concerned one day, 1 was a loyal participant in meetings. You don't have to take the elevator to the bottom is a famous AA saying, along with one day at a time-an expression that had particular meaning for me due to the duration of my drinking career. Scarcely a day went by when I didn't go to a meeting, and soon I found myself elected chairman of the meeting in the very church basement where I'd attended my first day in AA. Isn't it amazing how life comes full circle? They say there are no coincidences. Everything is part of God's plan, and here I was at the break between the qualification and the sharing from the floor, sanctimoniously intoning, "Anonymity is a spiritual part of our program, ever reminding us to place principles over personalities. In other words, what you see here and hear here, leave it here." I was as compulsive in attending my meetings as Monica was in coming out with derivative critiques of abstract expressionism so I could berate her into a state of sexual

But we were running into yet another problem. AA is a program of honesty. Wasn't I harming Monica to criticize her so cruelly? Was it wrong of me to do something harmful to her, even if that harmful thing brought about pleasure? And should I have promptly admitted I was wrong even though it would have eliminated Monica's desire for me?

I dealt with all these problems in the meetings. Another AA slogan is progress, not perfection. I felt bad about berating Monica, pulling her by the hair, and even punching her, as I did on one occasion when she said that Larry Rivers reminded her of Rembrandt; but if she enjoyed it, who was I to adjudicate another person's pleasures? Life was a mystery. They say seek and je shall find.

Since Monica was in a relationship with an alcoholic, she qualified for Al Anon, but when I mentioned the Al Anon slogan detach with love, she became apoplectic. For someone who thought nothing about throwing her legs around my waist in an attempt at midair copulation, the notion of detachment was a hard concept to grasp. Monica was also not interested in some of the other ideas that came up in recovery meetings, like sitting with your feelings. The only way she was going to sit was on my lap with a cock between her legs-a position that contradicted some of the basic premises of the Al Anon program.

I was more dependent on General Shapiro than ever. At times, I felt like a lucky man. I was living the American dream, getting my brains fucked out night and day with no strings attached; Monica was too busy being horny to think about marriage or babies. What she dreamt about was what she hadthe equivalent of a brutal abstract expressionist who subjugated her to his ideas and pushed her around before throwing her down on the bed. At other times I felt I was living a nightmare of brutality in which I was controlling another human being for my own invidious purposes. Only General Shapiro could effectively wean Monica from her outdated ideas. Part of the therapy was to build up her self-confidence. Shapiro was walking a fine line. How could he get rid of the sex kitten without losing the sex?

03

It was after a particularly productive session, during which Shapiro had been working with Monica on being more assertive (his technique was to provoke her so as to get her to argue with him), that I came home to find Monica rolling naked on a sheet of plastic that was covered with a mixture of paints. When she saw me she stared up longingly, spread her legs, and started to play with herself. Even I knew that body painting and action painting had nothing in common, but this time I kept my mouth shut. She was already turned on. She didn't need me. My reluctance to demean her was an act of love. But what resulted was a far cry from our usual passion. We made love, but the feeling of oneness was gone.

It remained to be seen whether the mixture of masturbation and self-assertion could bring about the hot sex we'd had when I was pulling her by the hair, pinching her, and slapping her around. And I didn't have to wait long to find out. General Shapiro had ignited something I had never seen in Monica before. In the past, when we went into a session, Monica would fold her arms around her chest and wait for Shapiro to make a statement, which she would then pull apart. She had spent a good portion of the couples counseling trying to attack his credibility. Now it was apparent that General Shapiro had something she wanted. She went after his ideas as greedily as she grabbed my dick when she was horny. Her lust for knowledge was becoming as great if not greater than her lust for sex. She was opening her mind with the same abandon with which she'd spread her legs.

"You're an intelligent woman," General Shapiro said at one point. Still acting the dumb broad, Monica looked around to see if someone else was in the room. Shapiro caught it. I crossed my fingers, hoping he wasn't going to remark on it. Monica still had her defensiveness. When Shapiro said something about her, she took it as a criticism, even when he meant to be helpful. Of course, Shapiro couldn't resist being right.

"Who are you looking for?" he barked. "See, that's my point. It's striking how you have no belief in your own abilities." Naturally Monica grew silent, but she was learning instead of fighting back. The next day when I came home from my AA meeting, I found her sitting naked in the upholstered armchair that sat in front of the TV. She'd pulled her legs up against her chest. She had a vibrator in one hand, a paint brush in another, and a pad between her legs. She was making figures that almost looked like Chinese ideograms. She'd make a stroke with her right hand, while pressing the vibrator against her pussy with her left. She moaned softly to herself as she came, but the moaning lacked the desperation that had formerly accompanied her orgasms. It was almost like singing. After she was done, she got dressed and asked me if I wanted to go out for dinner. We hadn't gone to a restaurant since our first two dates at The Golden Cock.

I was taken aback at first. Dinner? Go out? The words had become foreign. I wasn't sure how to process them. Dinner usually meant ordering in Chinese and seeing Ting's face up against the window of the bunker as I straddled Monica's writhing body. I would be lying if I said I didn't feel a sense of loss, but I wasn't angry or frustrated. I was no more interested in getting into her pants than she was in mine, though I wasn't necessarily happy about the new state of affairs either. I was scared. What would it mean for our relationship? I needed my friends from the AA group or General Shapiro, but it would be hours before my next meeting and days before our next appointment.