Bad love is better than no love July 19, 1985

 

They say some people get depressed after sex – especially unsuccessful sex.

I suppose that’s how I felt when she was gone; but trying to explain this to Pauly left me speechless.

I simply said, “it didn’t feel right.”

The sex was fine, even if I didn’t perform the way I would have liked.

The touching and closeness came across, which was what mattered, considering how exhausted I was from working two jobs.

The inappropriate feeling came later when she asked if she could see me next Tuesday, as if making an appointment.

I couldn’t convey this feeling, nor how cheap I felt each time I thought about her husband.

I kept envisioning old TV shows in which husbands chase the lover of their wives, or the cuckhold husbands permeating English literature.

Shakespeare seemed to believe that a cuckhold husband deserved what he got.

It still doesn’t make if feel right or good, and I’ve come away with the impression that I am company for Safire right up to the point when she decides to leave to join her husband in the great beyond.

I should be relieved; my life hasn’t changed. There are no demands, just the impression in the bed aching for love.

Sex is cheap. People do it all the time, everywhere, are driven to it, or away from it, by the mechanical strains of the body. The need of it driving people into the most insane situations.

Or maybe it is love perceived as sex that most warps people, the attempt at finding completion in a single act, an insane idea, a self-deception, that causes the world to rumble and shake.

With Safire, it may only be an act.

Lying there next to me, she told me about one of those infamous private parties she engaged in while a stripper, the horror she felt when pushed in a world of lust – though people are never as innocent as they pretend to be. There is always a hint that warns them of what to expect.

She went looking for love and got violence. Some men, she said, expected her to make love to a black woman to entertain them, men who forced the black woman to do more than just simulated sex in an attempt to humiliate her, using Safire as their weapon.

That’s not love. That’s not even sex. It is power, although at time, sex and power intermingle and become the same thing.

While on the other hand, love can be the most powerful thing in the world.

Safire couldn’t go through with it, she said, fleeing the scene, losing a shoe as she ran, hitchhiking home from some remote location, crying the whole time, being told by the male driver she shouldn’t have hitchhiked, and how dangerous it was, he having the same look as the sick fellows she had fled, and she, fed up with it all, brandishing the heel of her remaining shoe, telling him it was other people who took chances when they messed with a girl like her.

Why she told me this story, I’m not sure, maybe as a kind of warning, brandishing the heel of her shoe at me to make sure I don’t hurt her. She had grown hard again, angry again, admitting at that moment she had taken up with her husband in order to escape that world and that any sign of love he showed her no matter how violent or corrupt was better than no love.

When she said this, I felt sorry for him, sorry for a weak, violent alcoholic, helplessly clinging to love, and it made me feel even guiltier, and had ruined whatever pleasure I had expected to get from having sex with her.

I knew right then this wouldn’t work; but I couldn’t explain it to Pauly.

 


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