Works/White Rectangles

I don't like genitalia. At best they are uninteresting, and at worst, downright ugly.

Even the words are ugly. Testicles. Penis. Vulva. Vagina. Labia. Mons. Glans. Except for "clitoris." I rather like that one. I don't know why. All those horrid Greek and Latin words. The euphemisms, on the other hand, are completely ridiculous. A penis is always a shaft or rod or pole, hard as steel, protruding mystically the way a chromed hood ornament announces a vintage car. The vagina is apparently a little more frightening; it becomes a dark hole filled with sensation and mystery.

There are almost no nerve endings inside a vagina.

A penis reminds me of many things, but today it reminds me of an earthworm. Throbbing, expanding and contracting as it breathes, stretching and shrinking slowly, a pink appendage with a purpose but no sight, with instincts but no thought, leaving sticky fluid on everything it rubs against.

Earthworms are hermaphrodites. The fifteenth segment is male; the ninth is female. They glue themselves together soixante-neuf with their spit and writhe, conjoined, for hours.

Labia means "lips." Labia don't look like lips. Lips are soft and padded, soothing like the quilting in a hand-stitched comforter. Labia look like the gills on an oyster, wavy ridges of flesh nested one inside another. It's a pity the clitoris isn't more like a pearl; it's a shame to waste a good metaphor.

Oysters. You clean off the outside of the shell where it gets all gritty. One half of the shell is shallower than the other; hold that side facing up. Take the knife and jab it into the muscle in the back, where the shell hinges. Push in and give it a sideways twist and the shell pops open. A cut along the inside curve like severing a grapefruit section. Tilt it to your mouth and let it slide down the back of your throat, its way sped by the thin stream of liquid from the shell, slimy and cold.

I prefer them fried.

I sigh and open another window on the screen. A blank white rectangle. It is meant to remind me of a piece of paper, as if I am preparing to dip a quill in an inkwell and scratch characters into the glass of my screen. The only aspect of blank paper it succeeds in reproducing is intimidation. I begin to type.

"I shouldn't do this," I said.

Again that enigmatic twist of his lips. Sweeping one arm around me, he pulled me to him roughly. Through my blouse, my nipples pressed against his bare chest. I could tell that he felt them stiffen at the contact. He grinned, teeth a shocking contrast against his skin. He began to unbutton my blouse, not releasing me with his other hand, deft but unhurried.

"Don't -" I began.

He silenced me, his lips to mine, his tongue teasing over my teeth. Close against his kiss, my nose full of the leftover shampoo smell of his hair, my tongue tasting salt where sweat had reached the corners of his mouth. He pulled away and I inhaled sharply.

"Again," I said.

"You shouldn't," he replied, with that flash of white teeth.

I pulled his face to mine, arm around his neck, and tasted him greedily.

No. This won't do. Not enough genitals.

Never mind that the beauty of my mysterious stranger is in his eyes and his quick laugh, and the way he charmed her with his words in whatever improbable location he met her. Never mind that it's his smell and the glint of his teeth which make her readjust her napkin in her lap while waiting for dinner to arrive, scared that her body is somehow emitting signals that will betray her, not just to the dark man across the table, but to the entire restaurant.

"Excuse me, madam," the waiter says, displaying only the exact amount of humility required. He sets a silver dish with a domed silver cover before her with a flourish.

"What's this?" she asks. Her stranger has conveniently slipped away - telephone, toilet, any reason you like. Some scheme of his? An unorthodox hors d'oeuvre arranged in secret?

The waiter lifts the lid. It is a smooth, obscene silicone object, swirled peach and white like a confection. She feels her face burn, and casts her eyes down to avoid meeting eyes at the adjacent tables. Then she realizes she appears to be studying it. She closes her eyes and puts her hands to her face.

"If madam will permit me ...." The waiter is pulling her chair back from the table.

"What -" He lifts her napkin from her lap, refolds it in two midair passes like a toreador. As it drifts to rest beside her bread plate, he is already lifting her skirt.

She is too stunned to move. She wants to make a loud noise, but then the whole place would turn to look. And then, one, two, it is inside her. She gasps. The waiter releases the elastic of her panties carefully, so as not to snap against her skin - very thoughtful, she thinks, before she catches herself thinking it. By then her skirt has been smoothed down, her chair is back at the table, and both waiter and dish are gone.

She glances around nervously. Is that a knowing look from the woman at the table to her right? No one else seems to have noticed. How is that possible? Well, she certainly can't remove it right here. In the ladies' room - but, no, her stranger will think she's abandoned him. When he comes back.

The silicone hors d'oeuvre shifts within her. She straightens like someone dropped an ice cube down her dress. It's expanding, finding the limits of where it's been placed, pushing out to meet them.

She fidgets in her chair.

It's moving, wriggling, spreading out to flow over all the sensitive skin, feeling like someone's taking a plaster cast of her labia, her vulva, everything. She wonders, just for a moment, what that cast would look like. She shakes her head and squeezes her legs together, which presses the stuff like modelling clay up onto and against her clitoris. She quickly pulls her legs apart and takes a sip of her water. She's sure her face is like a beet by now.

It's so warm. It's like it's giving off heat, or maybe that's just her. She closes her eyes, leans back in the chair a little ....

The ladies' room. She needs to get to the ladies' room this instant. But her beautiful stranger? And the waiter, where in hell's the waiter?

The motion is so frantic. She makes the first soft, involuntary noise - and frantically looks around to see who's overheard.

Wait. I am leading myself astray.

How did I get to a restaurant? Where is my stranger? Admittedly, he's a little boring - that's the problem with mysterious strangers, they're all ciphers - but to just abandon him like that? More importantly, I am once again writing something no one wants to read.

Perhaps if I start with the genitals and work backwards. I open another white rectangle and stare at it for a moment before beginning to type.

"Tell me what you want," he said, out of breath.

"Your cock," I replied, head back, squirming and gasping as his fingers continued to tease me. "I want it inside me."

"You can do better than that," he said, rubbing his index finger in rapid circles, dialing my clit like a telephone.

"I want - ooh! - I can't think when you're doing that -"

"Don't think. Tell me what you want."

"Fuck me. I want you to fuck me. Put that cock inside me and fuck me hard. Fuck me until I can barely breathe and I pull the sheets off."

He leaned down and licked my clit - once, quickly, unexpectedly. I squeaked and tensed up.

"Not yet," he said.

He slid up me, pressing against me as he wriggled upward, so I could feel his erection moving against my stomach and up between my breasts, teasingly hard and burning hot. I closed my eyes.

His weight lifted from me, I felt him change position, and when I opened my eyes he was kneeling astride my face, not actually touching me anywhere - except where the head of his cock brushed lightly against my lower lip. I poked my tongue out, experimentally.

"You didn't say 'please,'" he said.

This will take me nowhere.

My stranger is apparently gone - those aren't the words I planned for him. Now I seem to have an established couple, trying to enliven their sex with racy language. Of course the problem is that all those blunt words are so ridiculous - but the good words, the real sex talk, should happen before ever reaching the bed.

The idea, husband, is to enflame her so badly that she can't contain herself, her body spontaneously wrapping itself around yours as soon as you reach the bedroom - or before.

"What are you thinking?" he asked, not taking his eyes off the road.

"Not much of anything," I said. "Why?"

"You looked bored."

I shrugged. "I've looked bored for the last three hundred miles."

"I know."

He drove without saying anything else for ten, fifteen minutes. I gathered that was the end of it and went back to looking out the window.

"Imagine," he said, "that I've pulled up your shirt, pulled it up over your tits, and I'm licking your left nipple."

I turned to look at him, raising an eyebrow. He kept his eyes on the road.

"Yep. Running my tongue around it slowly, enjoying the way it tastes. When I feel it starting to stiffen, I bite it softly, roll it back and forth a little, gently, between my teeth, trying to get it as hard as possible. I reach up and squeeze it between my thumb and forefinger, lean further across you, and try to make your right nipple act the same way."

"Hmm," I said. "Are you trying to tell me something?"

"I kiss the undersides of your breasts where they droop and get sweaty on hot days. I kiss your stomach. I poke my tongue into your navel and you squeak."

I grinned. "Goof."

"I reach over you and pull on the lever that reclines your seat. With it all the way back, with you lying nearly horizontally, I bring my head down by your knees and nose up under your skirt, lifting it with my head. My face and chin brushes against your crotch when I do that. There's not a lot of space. I grab the top of your panties between my teeth and tug them down, enough that I can poke my cold nose against your clit and wiggle it back and forth."

"You're pretty agile, to be able to do that in the front seat of the car. Unless you're kneeling in the floor space in front of me ...."

He sighed and shook his head. "Suspension of disbelief."

"I understand what you're trying to do, but if you want to get me hot, then you're doing it the wrong way."

"All right. Tell me something that gets you hot."

But she can't do that. Her fantasies are mine. They are good fantasies and unsalable fiction.

I want to be hypnotized into a robot slave and made to do your bidding, she wants to say. But how would you react? I want to be transformed into a brood mare and mounted like one, whinnying in mindless ecstasy. I want to be inflated like a balloon until the wonderful pressure is unbearable and I come with an explosive hiss. I want to be infected with an alien virus and gradually become some repugnant tentacled thing that exerts a perverse fascination over you. And I can't say any of that.

She says nothing. And maybe I should say nothing as well. I close all the rectangles in disgust without saving them. I should never have tried to be an author. Never.

I turn off the infernal machine and walk into the bathroom. A shower will calm me down.

I turn the water on, ice-cold, and strip off my robe. Stepping into the lovely refreshing stream, I feel the familiar, pleasant sensation of my skin drinking the water, absorbing it thirstily as fast as the spray can wash over it. The leaves on my head glisten and lose their droop. I close my eyes and stand for a while, utterly motionless.

After a time, I go out into the garden with the high fence, and put down my taproots for a welcome nap.

I should have stayed a gardener.

Copyright © June 1998. Do not distribute or reproduce.