Norman Rush - Mating

If he erred it was on the side of being more consultative than he needed to. He was solicitous. I could be on top to my heart’s content. Up close he had more hair on his shoulders and back than I had realized. He must have been fatter at one time, because there were striae on his buttocks and the sides of his upper legs. I loved our early sex. If it could be done I would drop down into reliving it over and over like those rats that press a pedal connected to their pleasure centers and press it until they die. This is only to say I wish I could relive it, god help me. This is too extreme. I become extreme, at times, still.

In the spirit of saying everything, he was uncircumcised. He had a significant penis. At first I had to deal with feelings that a smaller penis would have been more relaxing for me. There was a history to this. At some level an average or slightly less than average penis is always going to be a relief to me, thanks to my mother’s berserk attempts to infect me with a specific sex fear. She must have had an unusually small introitus, assuming the whole thing wasn’t a fantasy. She claimed she’d been harmed in a relationship with a man whose penis was simply too big for her, too wide across, as she put it. A woman should always find out if this was the case with a man lest she fall in love and be in for physical suffering. My present theory is that this was probably a fantasy concoction obliquely related to her becoming obese, justifying it, where fat becomes a form of armor against the possibility of all sexual approaches. But maybe she did have an abnormal introitus and this is unjust. She compared the hurtful penis to a Lebanon bologna and a rolling pin. Denoon suggested this scene might be transposed from a real molestation incident in her childhood, which had never occurred to me.

I think she also tried to warn me about uncircumcised men, but not insistently enough to leave a mark, evidently. I did examine his member fairly closely when we first made love, to his amusement. I was holding a candle up next to it, and he asked me to be careful re the molten wax. He asked if I knew that prostitutes in Gaborone, the more hip ones, carried lemons in their handbags which they would squeeze over the penis of a prospective if they were worried about small lesions or sores being present, an adaptation to the detestation by both sexes of the use of condoms. You know many things, I said, but not that I don’t need that. He was holding a little jar of Vaseline. His wife had always used it, or something like it. He was embarrassed. I asked If the prospect flinches, what happens? Is the deal off or is the lemon juice considered a disinfectant? He said he didn’t know. Clever of you not to know, I said.

In the act he was very orthodox, which was what I wanted. I wanted him to be solid in what I think of as the foundational part of sex. His endurance was good to the degree that I sometimes held myself back for a long time, although not often. The man had been celibate for two years, was a consideration. I asked him if he used particular images to retard himself. He said yes but didn’t want to tell me what they were. I tried to encourage him by telling him a thing I do to move myself on, if I need to. There is a certain type of swing for young children that used to be common in parks in Minnesota, consisting of a square of piping with a canvas sling affixed to the front and back of the upper rim. There was quite a bit of direct pressure on your je ne sais quoi. My mother specialized in taking me to parks at dinnertime or even later because she was likelier not to encounter anyone there for her to have to talk to or act normal toward. She would talk to herself while she pushed me hard and interminably. I was tiny, but there were certain moments that were rapturous and erotic. It seemed to have to do with how long the swinging lasted. In retrospect I’m astonished that no one was ever prompted to inquire about this strange woman. We weren’t always the only ones in the park, and my mother talked a lot. I was surprised when I discovered there were people who didn’t talk to themselves pretty much nonstop in the privacy of their own homes. I thought it was part of adulthood. Nelson was interested in my story but still wouldn’t tell me his images, saying it might be bad luck. He was very noisy, for a man. This is not a complaint. These bosun’s chair swings were suspended by chains, not ropes, and the sound of the chains squeaking together at the peak of the highest rises, just before the strain came off them as you rose above the crossbar, is a sound that helps if I can reimagine it. His groans of release were a cross for me between music and food. I was convinced I could hear sadness going away when they came. I felt I knew he was sad about something he was unlikely ever to admit, but that these were moments when I could hear it going, being overwhelmed.

Afterward he would sleep like the dead, almost instantly afterward, it seemed to me. It was a tribute. He might try to converse for a while, but I was kind and let him plunge. I experimented some, as in seeing how loud I could talk or sing when he was asleep before he would stir. I perused him. He had the usual vaccination scar and one from a mastoidectomy. I had more scars than he did. Depending on how he was lying, I could take his sac in my palm and watch it slowly heave around, one of my favorite phenomena for its power to ground you utterly in the biological substrate of being. He was graying, but concentratedly, in his nape hair and behind his ears, more behind his right ear than his left. My utopia is equal love, equal love between people of equal value, although value is an approximation for the word I want. Why is it so difficult? Assortative mating shows there has to be some drive in nature to bring equals together in the toils of love, so why even in the most enlightened and beautifully launched unions are we afraid we hear the master-slave relationship moving its slow thighs somewhere in the vicinity? It has to be cultural. In fact the closest thing to a religion I have is that this has to be cultural. I could do practically anything while he was asleep and not bother him. I wrote in my journal, washed dishes in slow motion if we hadn’t gotten around to them. I was emotional a lot, privately. I wanted to incorporate everything, understand everything, because time is cruel and nothing stays the same.

The Bathing Engine

The bathing engine was good for us. We were using it in fairly cold weather. Denoon would make the fire under the boiler and I would run out in my kimono when the tub was full of hot water. We would get in together and I would slide one of the litani mats aside so that we could look out into the desert. Denoon took the back position and I would recline against him. The bath hut was dim in a particular way that obscurely bothered me at first. Then through free associating, with Nelson, around why I felt that way, I was able to transcend. That made the bathing engine sessions auspicious. Confessional or difficult times between us came up there.

I would smolder over stupid things. In cleaning up I had found a copy of a radio message he had sent out in February after hearing that Bernadette Devlin McAliskey had been shot. It annoyed me that he knew her, that that was the level he moved at. I even imagined that maybe he had had something to do with her, since she was so superbly political, his kind of woman, and so on. We cleared that up. I was able to help him with his depression about Poland. He was expecting the Russians to invade and produce a bloodbath. Solidarity had been pretty much repressed, but he was still expecting the Russians. I gave him a useful rule of thumb. I said In the case of Poland, which would be more dramatic and historically interesting — for the Russians to invade the way they did in Czechoslovakia or for the government to manage things on its own with imprisonments and halfway measures and so on? He agreed it would be the first. So my rule of thumb was that of any two possible historical outcomes that you could possibly be aware enough of to obsess on, by some huge odds and for some unknown reason it would be the less dramatic and interesting that was likeliest to occur. This is one of those conceits that happen to be apposite, for the most part. He liked it well enough to urge it on me later once or twice when I was having similar megrims.