Irina, Carlita, Olga, and Jane
Coming and Going
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I moved myself today, “voluntary temporary suicide” be damned, not one box involved, even for the thousand books and all the miles of files. I want to see things, put them where they go, and get on with this ‘living-by-my-wits’ arrangement with the cosmos, to write my butt off every day. My ass is on a leather suitcase just now, and I’m typing this missive on top of a bitty stained nightstand, the only piece of furniture left in what will soon be “my old place.”
Jane and I had sex here last night, my bare butt on top of the nightstand that holds my laptop right this second. She chose yet another of the strange spots she likes---the apartment littered with a scribe’s detritus, candles guttering away, and her grinding by bottom into the sweat-slicked wood until she had her way with me---to launch once more her ‘come-and-go’ approach to our affair. She also employed the element of surprise, another favorite device. She wouldn’t have fucked me if I’d been expecting her, I swear to God. I forgot she had a key, so she startled me much more than vice versa, in spite of my prancing about in the altogether, anything hanging flapping freely.
Irina, meanwhile, she had already told me, “I’m through with you!” in her tough Croation accent; what was I supposed to do, other than believe her? I like a daily dose of the contact, thank you very much, even if I’m not as frisky as once-upon-a-time. Thus, under the circumstances, I was delighted to indulge Jane, since Irina was only interested in “friendship, the souls of writers connected by their love of English Language,” or at least that’s what she had told me last.
When I arrived at her employer’s manse, however, from whence they had fled to Hilton Head for Spring Break, Irina came to the door wearing only a T-shirt and sandals, a nearly empty bottle of some esoteric Vodka in hand. Irina’s six foot two frame gobbled up the fabric she had applied to her torso, so that even the ‘extra large’ she always preferred left her furry, sleek, and glistening parts exposed.
“So! You think I should continue to fuck you, even though you’re thirty years older than me and won’t marry me? That’s what you think, huh?” I’ve never met a Yugoslav woman who wasn’t legendary, and Irina continues the trend.
Before I could protest that I was coming, as instructed, not to COME but to talk about life and work and all the stories she had to convey to me, she was kissing me, my beard covered with Janejuice, my surprise at Irina’s mouth the sweetest aspect of my life at this moment. Like a Nat King Cole song on some coffee shop sound system, “when she kisses me, I sure stay kissed.”
Most lovers have asked, if I’ve recently had another woman in my mouth, especially a sex as wet as Jane’s was tonight. The question might not be direct, but at least a “you taste strange; what have you been doing?” has been more or less de rigeur. Irina, on the other hand, went wild.
I tried to pull away, albeit halfheartedly, her kisses ranking number one---with a big bullet---on the irresistibility scale. “Hey, there, I want to honor what you wanted,” I lied. I was basically afraid I wouldn’t be able to get it up---although I was already engorged, she was so perfect for me---or that she’d shoot me with the little European pistol she kept under her pillow, which had led me to believe she did have a papa in some Yugo mafia and various intelligence contracts to fulfill. Who knows about such things?
“I’m not going to fuck you. You are too old. But I said nothing about ‘blow-up jobs’, did I? Tonight, you are too old for sex---and besides it’s my period---but I want to taste you, you taste so good.” She was slurring and blurring but uninterested in any demurral on my part.
“I don’t know, Irina, it may be better...” Performance was not a concern any longer, of which my drunken mad giant Croat fox was aware. She had her hands all over me, and my shorts half off of me. What concerned me was that when Jane came hard, and tonight, my goodness, the moon had been very full, there was quite a flood associated with it. I felt a little squeamish, what can I say? I’m not really an ‘alpha’ male, just a well-put-together beta-boy who really likes the taste and feel and mental deal of most that is feminine. In any case, Irina wasn’t having any of this.
“Have it your way then!” She didn’t let go of me, though, nor did she remove her breast from my mouth. “But I tell you this; you will never, ever have me again, if you deny me tonight.” So! There we were, in a driveway more expensive than a modest house in Atlanta, and she can really make a chicken sing, I kid you not. But I have a code, you know. I don’t give what I don’t get back. After a few minutes, she let up to insist. “Come for me, Jimbo!”
At this imprecation, I suggested we make our embrace more mutual, and she spat at me. “Filthy! I am bleeding. I don’t want that.” She had more of me, how long I don’t know, my tantra overflowing and glowing white hot, when she stopped as abruptly as she had demanded that she be allowed to begin. She drank half of the remaining few fingers of ‘Blue Ice’, or whatever, and said: “I knew you didn’t love me. I am going to bed. Call me tomorrow.”
Before I could do more than assent, she was inside, her retreating bottom like the cradle of God it was so divine, as the anchored root of my being bathed in the the afterflow of this night of glory.
I still had to visit Carlita, of course, who as my official sweetheart, normally wanted at least a check-in call each evening. She basically stopped having sex with me three months ago, when her mom’s final descent to the pit began, the recent acceleration of that declline leading to a free-fall depression in my Swedish goddess that broke my heart and galled me simultaneously. I knew I didn’t need to wash for Carlita; she would no more invite a congress than Bush would have lunch with Osama.
She was smoking on her little veranda when I let myself in, the cool air of the bloated lunar night dripping with the come and go of an Appalachian Spring, just like me. “You know that owl? I’ve been waiting for him tonight. I want to tell mom I heard him one more time.” We’d been fearful that a ‘murder of crows’ had rousted out the noble bird and killed it; never before have I so wanted a sign from God, a lifeline to my sweetest lover, lost in her own melancholy, like the madwoman who can’t find her way out of her own head.
I have told Carlita over and over: “I stand for life; one passing doesn’t need to mean that we foreswear each other out of grief. It’s just the opposite: hold on to this; hold on to me!” She took a drag on her cig in response to what she knew I was saying once again, silently. I agreed to give her a spell to rest. I would sit with her mother through the night, listening for the ‘agonal breathing’ Carlita had described to wake me from sleeping in the rocking chair next to Olga’s bed, where the last stages of Alzheimers were working the miracle of death in her brain.
The sound woke me from my fitful slumbers at 4:30, a harsh raw buzz-saw of breath that is a body’s final check that no other path than the final adventure is open. Olga died at 6:17, three of her four children gathered to bid her bye, and sturdy old cantankerous Alfred who had loved her all the fifty odd years of their marriage, and me, covered with come, fried from fatigue, and crazy with consternation and wonder simultaneoulsly, at the impassive perversity and wicked sweetness of existence.
Both Jane and Irina called me with the same question, before 9:00. “She’s gone, isn’t she?”
I feel as if I shoud go and roll in the muck and mire of the woods, until the stench of death and the scent of woodsy sex bringing life back into being from the void covers me. This marvel, this wonder, this impossible conjunction in the entropic sink of existence. If we destroy this miracle, we should all rot in eternal hell for the crime.