Partly what kept me going was stubbornness because I’d made up my mind before we started that I wouldn’t give up; and partly what it was was the feeling she aroused in me, a feeling that was, to be honest, made up of tenderness and concern and a kind of mere affection, a brotherliness, as if she were my brother, not different from me at all.
Actually this was brought on by an increasing failure, as the sex went on, of one kind of sophistication—of worldly sophistication—and by the increase in me of another kind, of a childish sophistication, a growth of innocence: Orra said, or exclaimed, in a half-harried, half-amazed voice, in a hugely admiring, gratuitous way, as she clutched at me in approval, “Wiley, I never had feelings like these before!”
And to be the first to have caused them, you know? It’s like being a collector, finding something of great value, where it had been unsuspected and disguised, or like earning any honor; this partial success, this encouragement gave rise to this pride, this inward innocence.
Of course that lessened the risk for this occasion; I could fail now and still say,
It was worth it,
and she would agree; but it lengthened the slightly longer-term risk; because I might feel trebly a fool someday. Also, it meant we might spend months making love in this fashion—I’d get impotent, maybe not in terms of erection, but I wouldn’t look forward to sex—still, that was beautiful to me in a way, too, and exciting. I really didn’t know what I was thinking: whatever I thought was part of the sex.
I went on; I wanted to hit the jackpot now. Then Orra shouted, “It’s
there!
It’s
THERE
!” I halted, thinking she meant it was in some specific locale, in some specific motion I’d just made with my tired tongue and jaw; I lifted my head—but couldn’t speak: in a way, the sexuality pressed on me too hard for me to speak; anyway, I didn’t have to; she had lifted her head with a kind of overt twinship and she was looking at me down the length of her body; her face was askew and boyish—every feature was wrinkled; she looked angry and yet naive and swindleable; she said angrily, naively,
“Wiley, it’s there!”
But even before she spoke that time, I knew she’d meant it was in her; the fox had been startled from its covert again; she had seen it, had felt it run in her again. She had been persuaded that it was in her for good.
I started manipulating her delicately with my hand; and in my own excitement, and thinking she was ready, I sort of scrambled up and, covering her with myself, and playing with her with one hand, guided my other self, my lower consciousness, into her. My God, she was warm
and restless inside; it was heated in there and smooth, insanely smooth, and oiled, and full of movements. But I knew at once I’d made a mistake: I should have gone on licking her; there were no regular contractions; she was anxious for the prick, she rose around it, closed around it, but in a rigid, dumb, faraway way; and her twitchings played on it, ran through it, through the walls of it and into me; and they were uncontrolled and not exciting, but empty: she didn’t know what to do, how to be fucked and come. I couldn’t pull out of her, I didn’t want to, I couldn’t pull out; but if there were no contractions for me to respond to, how in hell would I find the rhythm for her? I started slowly, with what seemed infinite suggestiveness to me, with great dirtiness, a really grown-up sort of fucking—just in case she was far along—and she let out a huge, shuddering, hour-long sigh and cried out my name and then, in a sobbing, exhausted voice, said, “I lost it.… Oh, Wiley, I lost it.… Let’s stop.…” My face was above hers; her face was wet with tears; why was she crying like that? She had changed her mind; now she wanted to come; she turned her head back and forth; she said, “I’m no good.… I’m no good.… Don’t worry about me.… You come.…”
No matter what I mumbled, “Hush,” and “Don’t be silly,” and in a whisper, “Orra, I love you,” she kept on saying those things, until I slapped her lightly and said,
“Shut up, Orra.”
Then she was silent again.
The thing was, apparently, that she was arrhythmic: at least that’s what I thought; and that meant there weren’t going to be regular contractions; any rhythm for me to follow; and any rhythm I set up as I fucked, she broke with her movements: so that it was that when she moved, she made her excitement go away. It would be best if she moved very smally: but I was afraid to tell her that, or even to try to hold her hips firmly, and guide them, to instruct her in that way for fear she’d get self-conscious and lose what momentum she’d won. And also I was ashamed that I’d stopped going down on her. I experimented—doggedly, sweatily, to make up for what I’d done—with fucking in different ways, and I fantasized about us being in Mexico, someplace warm and lushly colored where we made love easily and filthily and graphically. The fantasy kept me going. That is, it kept me hard. I kept acting out an atmosphere of sexual pleasure—I mean of my sexual pleasure—for her to rest on, so she could count on that. I discovered that a not very slow sort of one-one-one stroke, or fuck-fuck-fuck-Orra
now-now-now, really got to her; her feelings would grow heated; and she could shift up from that with me into a one-two, one-two, one-two, her excitement rising; but if she or I then tried to shift up farther to one-two-three, one-two-three, she’d lose it all. That was too complicated for her: my own true love, my white American. But her feelings when they were present were very strong, they came in gusts, huge squalls of heat as if from a furnace with a carelessly banging door, and they excited and allured both of us. That excitement and the dit-dit-ditting got to her; she began to be generally, continuingly sexual. It’s almost standard to compare sexual excitement to holiness; well, after a while, holiness seized her; she spoke in tongues, she testified. She was shaking all over; she was saved temporarily and sporadically: that is, she kept lapsing out of that excitement, too. But it would recur. Her hands would flutter; her face would be pale and then red, then very, very red; her eyes would stare at nothing; she’d call my name. I’d plug on one-one-one, then one-two, one-two, then I’d go back to one-one-one: I could see as before—in the deep pleasure I felt even in the midst of the labor—why a woman was proud of what she felt, why a man might kill her in order to stimulate in her (although he might not know this was why he did it) these signs of pleasure. The familiar Orra had vanished; she said, “GodohGodohGod” it was sin and redemption and holiness and visions time. Her throbs were very direct, easily comprehensible, but without any pattern; they weren’t in any regular sequence; still, they were exciting to me, maybe all the more exciting because of the piteous-ness of her not being able to regulate them, of their being like blows delivered inside her by an enemy whom she couldn’t even half domesticate or make friendly to herself or speak to. She was the most out-of-control girl I ever screwed. She would at times start to thrust like a woman who had her sexuality readied and well understood at last, and I’d start to distend with anticipation and a pride and relief as large as a house; but after two thrusts—or four, or six—she’d have gotten too excited, she’d be shaking, she’d thrust crookedly and out of tempo, the movement would collapse; or she’d suddenly jerk in midmovement without warning and crash around with so great and so meaningless a violence that she’d lose her thing; and she’d start to cry. She’d whisper wetly, “I lost it” so I’d say, “No, you didn’t,” and I’d go on or start over, one-one-one; and of course, the excitement would come back; sometimes it came back at once; but she was increasingly afraid of herself, afraid to move her lower body; she would try to hold still and
just
receive
the excitement; she would let it pool up in her; but then, too, she’d begin to shake more and more; she’d leak over into spasmodic and oddly sad, too large movements; and she’d whimper, knowing, I suppose, that those movements were breaking the tempo in herself; again and again, tears streamed down her cheeks; she said in a not quite hoarse, in a sweet, almost hoarse whisper, “I don’t want to come, Wiley, you go ahead and come.”
My mind had pretty much shut off; it had become exhausted; and I didn’t see how we were going to make this work; she said, “Wiley, it’s all right—please, it’s all right—I don’t want to come.”
I wondered if I should say something and try to trigger some fantasy in her; but I didn’t want to risk saying something she’d find unpleasant or think was a reproach or a hint for her to be sexier. I thought if I just kept on dit-dit-ditting, sooner or later she’d find it in herself, the trick of riding on her feelings, and getting them to rear up, crest, and topple. I held her tightly, in sympathy and pity, and maybe fear, and admiration: she was so unhysterical; she hadn’t yelled at me or broken anything; she hadn’t ordered me around: she was simply alone and shaking in the middle of a neural storm in her that she seemed to have no gift for handling. I said, “Orra, it’s O.K.: I really prefer long fucks,” and I went on, dit-dit-dit-dit, then I’d shift up to dit-dot, dit-dot, dit-dot, dit-dot.… My back hurt, my legs were going; if sweat was sperm, we would have looked like liquefied snowfields.
Orra made noises, more and more quickly, and louder and louder; then the noises she made slackened off. Then, step by step, with shorter and shorter strokes, then out of control and clumsy, simply reestablishing myself inside the new approach, I settled down, fucked slowly. The prick was embedded far in her; I barely stirred; the drama of sexual movement died away, the curtains were stilled; there was only sensation on the stage.
I bumped against the stone blocks and hidden hooks that nipped and bruised me into the soft rottenness, the strange, glowing, breakable hardness of coming, of the sensations at the approaches to coming.
I panted and half rolled and pushed and edged it in, and slid it back, sweatily—I was semiexpert, aimed, intent. Sex can be like a wilderness that imprisons you: the daimons of the locality claim you. I was achingly nagged by sensations; my prick had been somewhat softened before, and now it swelled with a sore-headed but fine distension; Orra shuddered and held me cooperatively; I began to forget her.
I thought she was making herself come on the slow fucking, on the prick which, when it was seated in her like this, when I hardly moved it, seemed to belong to her as much as to me; the prick seemed to
enter
me, too: we both seemed to be sliding on it; the sensation was like that; but there was the moment when I became suddenly aware of her again, of the flesh and blood and bone in my arms, beneath me. I had a feeling of grating on her, and of her grating on me. I didn’t recognize the unpleasantness at first. I don’t know how long it went on before I felt it as a withdrawal in her, a withdrawal that she had made, a patient and restrained horror in her, and impatience in me: our arrival at sexual shambles.
My heart filled suddenly—filled; and then all feeling ran out of it—it emptied itself.
I continued to move in her slowly, numbly, in a shabby hubbub of faceless shudderings and shufflings of the midsection and half-thrusts, half-twitches; we went on holding each other, in silence, without slackening the intensity with which we held each other; our movements, that flopping in place, that grinding against each other, went on; neither of us protested in any way. Bad sex can be sometimes stronger and more moving than good sex. She made sobbing noises—and held on to me. After a while sex seemed very ordinary and familiar and unromantic. I started going dit-dit-dit again.
Her hips jerked up half a dozen times before it occurred to me again that she liked to thrust like a boy, that she wanted to thrust; and then it occurred to me that she wanted me to thrust.
I maneuvered my ass slightly and tentatively delivered a shove, or rather, delivered an authoritative shove, but not one of great length, one that was exploratory; Orra sighed, with relief it seemed to me; and jerked, encouragingly, too late, as I was pulling back. When I delivered a second thrust, a somewhat more obvious one, more amused, almost boyish, I was like a boy whipping a fairly fast ball, in a game, at a first baseman—she jerked almost wolfishly, gobbling up the extravagant power of the gesture, of the thrust; with an odd shudder of pleasure, of irresponsibility, of boyishness, I suddenly realized how physically strong Orra was, how well knit, how well put together her body was, how great the power in it, the power of endurance in it; and a phrase—absurd and demeaning but exciting just then—came into my head:
to throw a fuck;
and I settled myself atop her, braced my toes and knees and elbows and hands on the bed and half-scramblingly worked
it—it
was clearly mine; but I was Orra’s—worked
it
into a passionate shove, a curving stroke about a third as long as a full stroke; but amateur and gentle: that is, tentative still; and Orra screamed then; how she screamed: she made known her readiness; then the next time, she grunted: “Uhnn-nnahhhhhh …” a sound thick at the beginning but that trailed into refinement, into sweetness, a lingering sweetness.
It seemed to me I really wanted to fuck like this, that
I
had been waiting for this all my life. But it wasn’t really my taste, that kind of fuck: I liked to throw a fuck with less force and more gradations and implications of force rather than with the actual thing; and with more immediate contact between the two sets of pleasures and with more admissions of defeat and triumph; my pleasure was a thing of me reflecting her, her spirit entering me; or perhaps it was merely a mistake, my thinking that; but it seemed shameful and automatic, naive and animal, to throw the prick into her like that.
She took the thrust: she convulsed a little; she fluttered all over; her skin fluttered; things twitched in her, in the disorder surrounding the phallic blow in her. After two thrusts, she collapsed, went flaccid, then toughened and readied herself again, rose a bit from the bed, aimed the flattened, mysteriously funnel-like container of her lower end at me, too high, so that I had to pull her down with my hands on her butt or on her hips; and her face, when I glanced at her beneath my lids, was fantastically pleasing, set, concentrated, busy, harassed; her body was strong, was stone, smooth stone and wet-satin paper bags and snaky webs, thin and alive, made of woven snakes that lived, thrown over the stone; she held the great, writhing-skinned stone construction toward me, the bony marvel, the half-dish of bone with its secretive, gluey-smooth entrance,
the place where I was
—it was undefined, except for that:
the place where I was;
she took and met each thrust—and shuddered and collapsed and rose again: she seemed to rise to the act of taking it; I thought she was partly mistaken, childish, to think that the center of sex was to meet and take the prick thrown into her as hard as it could be thrown, now that she was excited; but there was a weird wildness, a wild freedom, like children cavorting, uncontrolled, set free, but not hysterical, merely without restraint; the odd, thickened, knobbed pole springing back and forth as if mounted on a web of wide rubber bands: it was a naive and a complete release. I whomped it in and she went, “
UHNNN
!” and a half-iota of a second later, I was seated all the way in her, I jerked a minim of an inch deeper in her, and went, “
UHNNN!
”
too. Her whole body shook. She would go, “
UHN
!” And I would go, “
UHN!
”