Adam Thirlwell - Lurid & Cute

surprisingly social

For what was happening in front of me in this the present moment was that Romy and Epstein were naked too — or at least Epstein was, and Romy was let’s say topless. She came over to nakedly smoke a cigarette with Candy and me so I began a balanced conversation, one of those casual phrases like, oh I don’t know, like Romy, what the fuck? There was a vein on one of her breasts I could see, and as ever I considered how odd it was that nakedness feels like such an extensive knowledge, that even if one has seen a person naked already their nakedness is always an event, and it was an event — the way Romy’s breasts were there. So I just tried to make a neutral observation.

— Epstein is really out there, I said.

I think it was definitely neutral as talk goes but in fact I was thinking very specific things, the main one being a feeling of absolute jealousy and aloneness that I could never tell to anyone, for what right did I have to be jealous of Romy when I myself was attached very publicly to another woman? But still, I was jealous, after all, in this melancholy way, and I was sad that it turned out that she was seeing other people, or not just seeing them but loving them in a way that perhaps she did not love me. But then of course why should I be her only love, when she was not mine? Of which jealousy there was a secret compartment, as in some portable writing desk borne with him in the night by an aristocrat fleeing the workers’ revolution, which was this vision I now possessed of Epstein’s dark penis. I don’t think I’d ever seen an aroused penis that wasn’t mine, outside various screens, and it was very strange, to be both seeing a penis and knowing it belonged to a man who was fucking a woman I loved, or was about to, and possibly in front of me. Also I must admit, it seemed large or certainly not small and as well therefore as a sadness I also was interested to feel just kind of objectively impressed, so when Romy wandered away to return to this surprising athlete I just quietly pointed the fact out to Candy.

— You think that’s cool? said Candy.

— I think it’s cool, I said.

— It’s big.

— Sure is.

— But will he ever know what it’s like, said Candy, — to have a girl take his whole cock in her mouth and then look up at him gently with her big brown eyes?

I didn’t know what to say to that. Elsewhere there were conversations –

— Are you up yet? said Romy.

— You can’t tell? replied Hiro.

— but I carried on saying nothing, and just considered the interiors.

made painful by the existence of secrets

To say you have a secret life may possibly give some basic grandeur impression — as if you enjoy meetings in private cabanas inaccessible to the average person in their parka, that you are maybe attending suppers with cardinals in their palazzos and gossiping about presidents — but really secrecy makes your ordinary life so minute and heavy, it has this difficult effect that it forces you into braveries that no one really should have to bear. It sounds contradictory or kooky but secrecy, it turns out, is a form of exposing yourself to more things in this world than you should; it is to take your privacy into places that it should not need to go — like this moment where I understood I would have to watch Romy have sex with someone else, and with my wife naked beside me, and do this with the appearance of a bland curiosity. Porn barons or fascisti might imagine such things, but I have only ever been gracious in what I imagine. I am not grand enough to end all feeling altogether and see a person as only a body or form of pleasure. But then, I was thinking, this is what happens if you possess many secrets: you will have to learn something which perhaps other people are often spared, which is that everyone is inhabiting multiple universes at the same time — it’s just that usually the various asteroids and supernovas of these universes never meet. But sometimes if you have more than one life then the present moment will unfortunately see these worlds collide, and at these moments the contemporary will therefore call for total poise and bravura, and always I have wanted to be equal to the contemporary. If I had to watch these awful things, if I had to be my era’s chubby piece of heraldry, yes if I had to be its martyr, ecstatically poaching myself in boiling oil, sunning myself on a stake, then so be it. I would take on the demented consequences myself — even if in general it was usually in fact Candy, and not me, who found the contemporary easy and possible to accept. She was always good with stressful situations, like this one of taking off your clothes in multiple company — a situation I could not help but find extremely difficult, reminding me as it did of that moment in changing rooms, when everyone is naked but pretending to ignore the situation, the imprints of sock elastic on ankles, like toothmarks. But then perhaps this is also true when it’s just two of you in a room — that undressing is an unusual process, because to undress is so exhausting, it requires so many movements and processes of thinking. Yes, taking your clothes off and putting them on again in front of a stranger, it’s the most unnatural thing in the world. Perhaps that’s why desire’s necessary, otherwise no one would ever undress, not at all. Though as if in answer to my awkwardness Candy kindly gestured me underneath a duvet that someone had brought out — a child’s duvet printed with elongated footballs — and once again it struck me how tender she was, how much she loved and cared for me, while we sat there on the sofa, in observation, and in return I felt a total tenderness for her, too. But still, I do not recommend it — being present at an orgy sitting beside your wife, while watching a girl with whom you have recently woken naked in a hotel room, and bleeding — unless you’re some narco lord who is used to this condition of many wives and mistresses. Always my capacity for transgression had been very small. The usual transgressions of stealing scrips, or jumping the barriers of the metro, the manic machismo of dicking the help, I always thought these were beyond me. And so the nakedness I saw around me — because now more and more the atmosphere was happy and delighted and a large amount of people were kissing while in various states of nakedness, I say large amount which was maybe only nine or ten, but that I think is still a large amount of nakedness to observe — felt very intimidating, and in response I could feel my attention wanting to migrate, just stealing over the border into the empty wide fields. I often find it hard to concentrate on just one thing, and being here in this way I felt very much coerced or even trapped, inveigled by Fate and the very high stars — like the moment when the psychopath and his knife are claiming you, on the upstairs landing, and you know that the police goon in his squad car parked in the street below for a calm cigarro and empanada de carne is no way going to help you. And yet also I would say that, as in all things, predicting the precise degree to which you will be made uncomfortable is not an easy profession. I imagined that the problems of an orgy among close friends would be quite small, that they would be these problems of spectatorship . With spectatorship and jealousy I could make some exhausted arrangement. The bright disasters that were advancing, however, were something much more fantastical and suddenly I had this thought of my mother and my father, secluded in their bedroom, not so far away, my mother watching the late-night shows, my father snoring or in the bath, and I felt a total sadness or abandoned kind of feeling, like all I ever wanted was the miniature comedy of my parents. My father used to read the newspapers aloud to my mother, and they would comment derisively on the general scene. That kind of intimacy now seemed to me very distant and romantic, romantic perhaps precisely because it seemed so impossible and far away.