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.

 


email to Al Sullivan

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

An old nemesis December 11, 1985

Image
    Surisky hated me from early on in grammar school, although “hate” may be too strong a word to describe his reaction to me. I was simply available to him for abuse, Third grade was pivotal for both of us. Prior to that, we were simply feeling our way through Catholic School routine, emerging eventually as whole personalities from the muck of early childhood. He came across as a thug, trying to convey the image of a tough guy. He wore a leather jacket and spiked boots, and snuck into see James Dean movies. Third grade was tough on everybody, including the teachers, who considered us the worst class in the history of the school – even in the safe grades of Kindergarten, First and Second. Two of the three nuns retired after passing us on. But it was in the third grade that we began to work our magic, driving even the stout-hearted nuns crazy. Later, the nuns tried to break our spirit. But we fully represented our age and had the full impact of the 1960s behin...
Read more

The clock is ticking July 18, 1985

Image
  We’re talking love here – silly fictional love with all the connotations of disaster. I seem to be on the meat chopping block with Safire looking for qualities in me that are lacking in her husband. The fact that there is a husband in the first place greatly disturbs me. All this said, I’m uncertain as to why I haven’t ended this already, except to know she is too much like my ex-wife to pass up without a closer examination. Even the way she thinks: slow, methodical, going from point A to point B. It has only been a week since she blurted out drunk that she wanted me in bed. It seems like much longer. And she hints of something more permanent, suggesting that I might fill in for her husband for a much longer duration. The night before last she suggested I come see her in her trailer, as if she is legally separated from her husband, when in fact she is supposed to be biding time until he finds them both a place to live in Baltimore. This is the same kind of smoke and...
Read more

Pauly leaves Passaic for the final time July 24, 1985

Image
    Pauly is leaving Passaic again. This comes after two years of us rubbing shoulders after he had been cast out of paradise in Towaco, after his goddess, Jane, went and married that man Pauly calls “a bum.” This has been a tough two years, filled with Pauly’s typical manipulation, his usual shaping of reality to his own needs often at other people’s (mine) expense. When Pauly first came I had Fran’s cultist brother as a temporary guest and Pauly spent most of his time trying to push me into getting that guest out. A few months later – in November – Fran got the ax from her ex and changed her mind about moving in with me after I had committed the spare room to Pauly. He assumed she meant more to me than he did and was already packing when I told Fran no. She had no place to go except for her father’s house, a father she had a love/hate relationship with, and she held it against me, even though we continued to see each other romantically. Pauly being Pauly drove ...
Read more