FALL FROM GRACE, pt two
Impotent infidelity
“I will always be your lover,” she said tremulously. Her New Jersey accent momentarily subsumed by her bedroom voice.
What led up to the declaration.
My new internet friend expressed frustration her encouragement about my writing could not lift my self-doubt. Not even when she phoned to say the story I sent her stirred deep longings. She insisted I “forget depression, snap out of it, get cracking and write…” But depression had me by the throat. Can there be a more useless man than one fired from civil service, unable to find a real job in over three years? My lost chance at retirement and erosion of my deferred-comp just made it worse.
Dog shows, lit classes, law practice — I think her third doctorate was some kind of business thing; she mentioned corporate boards of which she was a member — she was indeed one busy lady. But determined to cheer me up. “I will talk you out of it!” she said. “Don’t wait for me to call when you get down. I get busy and get distracted. But,” she added, “don’t call me from home. Spouses never believe innocent contact with the opposite sex.” She cited her husband’s jealousy of men she worked with in her law practice.
Being literal-minded to a fault, the first time I called her was from a pay phone. She heard voices from the restaurant in the background and asked where I was. Expressed amusement at my obtuseness. “I meant call when you have no witnesses. So we can talk…privately.” Hell, I was dumb. She wanted to flirt. I said I was home alone all day. “So go home and call me…”
She introduced me to “phone sex.” Almost halfway to sixty years old and once more flummoxed by a Venusian. First time I heard her erotic bedroom voice: ”Pretend we’re in a car by an old cemetery, no one around. I put my hand on your thigh when I kiss you. What do you do? What do you want me to do? Tell me…”
Perhaps due to depression and recurring erectile dysfunction, I had allowed other women online to initiate me in “cybersex,” where I could pretend. I supposed phone sex was a variation on a theme. “Well,” I said. “You mention a graveyard. I knew a guy once who told stories about a woman who liked to screw on tombs at night…”
“Ooh, kinky! Did that excite you?”
“Not really. My father always said get a room. But since you set the scene, I would slip my hand under your skirt. I’ve found women love being pleasured by my fingers…” And so we began.
Steamy phone calls left her short of breath as if in orgasm. Another woman had told me she got off to my typed words. I wasn’t sure I believed that either. Sad ol’ John Thomas did not rise to telephone sex any more than cyber. I talked as good a game as I typed. Soon it was “When are you coming to visit me?”
Unemployed, with life savings running out, that seemed impossible. But Fate, which had seemed out to get me, changed tacks. My old friend Hollis had followed a career path ever higher as mine crashed and burned. He already had tried to jump-start me with my old outdoor publishing house. But the retiring publisher dropped dead of a heart attack before the deal closed and his heirs took another offer. Then Microsoft asked Hollis, as a nationally know publications expert, to help build beguiling content for putative web sites, and he visited me en route to Redmond. Said print out any novel I had ready. He would take it to New York and find an agent. I did, and he did. The agent lined up a publisher. Could I get to New York to meet him?
Thoughts of my father’s decline, the same in store for me — and memory that sex with other women eased depression in the eighties — decided me. On my way to try for a book contract I would end my decade of fidelity, and find out if my triple-doc could cure erectile dysfunction.
Sadly, no. But that was the only sadness. The redhead drove me to my hotel and sat, elegant and composed, as I checked in. I had a well-appointed room, big bed, nice couch, even — low comedy — a crib. “Oh no,” she laughed. “I’m done with babies!”
We sat on the couch and resumed kissing. I tucked up her skirt, removed her panties and knelt to apply thirty years of cunnilingus practice carefully and assiduously. She was fresh and sweet as a field of clover. Drenched clover. At one point, as she came down from orgasm, I held her gaze and slowly sucked her juices off my fingers. Without touching her, she groaned — that wonderful familiar groan of old — and spasmed again.
Despite ED, what possible drug could suffuse my brain with such pure pleasure? LSD? Unlikely. I had rediscovered my drug of choice. We eventually undressed and moved to bed. John Thomas staged a halfhearted revival, weak shadow of his former Priapic majesty. She was so sensitized she came when he tentatively nuzzled in. His marginal adequacy conjured D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley before her gamekeeper, and effete Englishmen softening after premature ejaculation staying in her while she squeezed and writhed to attain her “crisis.” Something I had experienced only once over ten years ago, drunk on tequila, with a redhead of a different hue who may have been a sociopath.
Over a decade later, my oral lovemaking so primed this Constance she needed little extra stimulation. Her husky bedroom voice was sexy. Had she really ever sounded like New Jersey? Resting after a series of galvanic eruptions, she treated ol’ John like a favorite pet, so kind to him with lips and fingers she coaxed a feeble emission that from inside felt a lot stronger.
Finally she could go no more. She was limp, a contented rag doll. “I have never in my whole life had so many orgasms,” she murmured, sprawled on her stomach. Then she slept. I faced a dilemma: I had never discussed sleep apnea. Needed my CPAP. Go without — or risk disturbing her to unpack and plug it in? Would the sound wake her? I risked it. Soon as I had my mask on, I was gone. It had been a long, long day since departing SeaTac.
She woke me in the wee hours, kissing me under the mask. I was disoriented. Who was this lovely naked stranger gazing at me so fondly? Oh. Yeah. Her lips curved with humor. “Poor baby. Did I use you so bad you needed oxygen?” God, it felt good to laugh so hard. We dressed while I told her about sleep apnea.
We ate at an all-night restaurant. I picked up my rental car. Back in the room she petted the couch. “Dear, dear couch,” she said. “Magical couch.” Shit, sentimental too? This woman had many endearing qualities. Our lovemaking was drowsy and newly familiar. With the wake-up call, she said sleeping with me she felt safe and loved, best sleep in ages. Even the machine noise reassured her — like “white-noise” tapes to fight her insomnia.
After breakfast — the eastern waitress never heard of salsa — she took me back to bed. We were both due to leave. “I want this,” she said, “even though I’m supposed to be in court…” Man! Court is serious business. Old bureaucratic habit gave me a guilty twinge, suppressed at once. Soon she was on hands and knees bucking against my hand, fingers spread, two in her cunt and two in her ass, making her crazy. “I’ve never had this,” she gasped. “I need this. I deserve this!” Nothing more about court.
For an intense hour we added to her store of orgasms. Indulged in too-short afterglow. “I so do not want to go. But I must. I don’t even have fresh clothes for court! Don’t care. This time, I do not care.”
