Romance / Urban Romance

“Fucking is all that matters, (baby)”!

       I’m not sure about the “baby” part, but the rest I remember for certain.  I blurted it out the way another man might yell “Eureka” or “Hallelujah”.  It was the same sense of revelation in quite a different context.
      I was with a woman named Linda at the time, fucking her quite hard from behind.  I saw the shock waves running through her ass and torso; in the bedroom mirror I saw her long breasts flap together in time with my thrusting.  Rather than a porno movie, it reminded me of those old black and white movies that chronicle man’s early attempts at aviation—the ones in which some strange contraption shakes and shimmies with a lot of promise, but then ultimately falls over and combusts.  It was a similar kind of hope and effort, a similar amount of distance traveled.  I pressed the sweat out of my eyebrows.
    Outside it was hot.  It was Toronto in July in the middle of a heat wave. The apartment window was open with a fan blowing and still we were soaking wet.  We were making those slapping flesh sounds that resonate like applause and travel through walls like a rap song on heavy base.  We didn’t care about the noise though.  Neighbors and thin walls be damned, we were spewing out the hi-octane exhortations of good fitness instructors, some guttural noises, and quasi-animal grunts.  It was a lot of commotion for a residential area.
     It was enough commotion that I thought that a little non sequitur like “fucking is all that matters (baby)”, might slip by without much notice; previously phrases much worse than this had flown by without a hitch.   But something about the delivery of this one, made it hang in the air a little longer than the others.   It echoed back several times and then before I knew it had transformed itself into a neon sign on my bedroom wall.  There would have to be a talk about it I supposed.
I finished up and stretched out beside her, exhausted, and out of breath.  I relaxed for a moment as the portable fan blew back and forth across the length of our bodies.  I could feel my heartbeat in my eyes.  Next to me I could feel Linda’s petite body begin to stiffen in the breeze.  She was thinking, and I knew almost exactly what she must be thinking about.  She knew I knew, I knew she knew I knew, but still there was nothing to say about it.
    Outside my window, over the noise of Linda’s thinking, I could hear cars driving by honking their horns, because France had just won the World Cup.  I was one half Quebecois French and therefore one half winner of the greatest contest on earth today.  Coming on the heels of an orgasm and a momentous insight, it was one of those rare moments of almost complete contentment.  Like many such moments, it was about to vanish with the onset of human voices.

Linda drank Evian water and then turned to me.
—”So did you really mean that?” she asked.
—”Mean what?” I asked.
—”You know what.”
—”Oh that”.
—”Yes that”.
I shrugged.
—” I don’t know. I was having sex at the time”.
—”But there was truth in it, wasn’t there?”
—”I was having sex, what does it matter what I said.”

    She was silent for a moment, as she took another mouthful of Evian.
—”Because I think maybe it’s the truth. I think you tell the truth when you’re having sex like most people tell the truth when they’re drunk.”
—” In coitus veritas”. I said, and closed my eyes.    I thought it was the cleverest thing I had said in weeks.  The conversation should end right here I thought, but Linda thought differently
—” It’s true though isn’t it?”  She gently touched my shoulder. “Just tell me and I’ll leave you alone.”
‘That’s the problem’, I thought.  ‘You will leave me completely alone’.
—” If I had shouted out I love you, would you have believed that too?”
—”But that’s not what you said. You said fucking is all that matters to you, and I think maybe it’s true”.
  My words repeated back to me in a state of clear thinking made me cringe.  Linda was right—these were like the words of a drunken man.
—” So what if it were true?” I said.  “What would you think of me if it were?”
—”I don’t know.  It wouldn’t matter I guess.  It would just be kind of sad I think.”

        I gave up trying to hide behind closed eyelids and opened eyes.  When I did, I found Linda’s small face much different than when I had left it.  There was pity in her eyes.  So much pity that I thought for a moment that I must be dying.  In her eyes at least something about me was very ill.  The last of my post orgasmic contentment slipped away.
—” Well it’s not true”, I contended, rising on my elbows.  “A lot of things matter to me”.
—“Like what?” she asked evenly.
        I sighed and tried to look insulted.
—” Like what”, she repeated.  Her head resting easily on her cocked arm, I knew she could stay there peering into me for eternity if I didn’t answer her.
—”My writing matters to me”, I said.
—”You write pornographic poems.”
—”It’s still writing. And my family matters to me”.
—” I didn’t even know you had a family.”
  I looked at her hard in the eyes.
—” Give me a break, alright.  It was sex talk.”
  She waited half a beat and then dropped the bomb on me.
—” Sex talk is all we ever have”, she said.”
  I dropped my head back to the pillow.  That was the knockout punch.

Linda left a short time later and I went to the window to watch her cross the road and disappear down Huron Street. I knew from the hurried way she had snapped on her bra and kissed me good-bye, that I wouldn’t see her again. The sub-text to that little spat we’d had was that sex mattered to me and she perhaps did not. I thought she might have taken it better than this. It was Linda after all who had clanged beer bottles with me two weeks before and said, “Here’s to sex buddies”, claiming not to want anything too complicated right now. Maybe I hadn’t heard her right. Or maybe I had given her too much of the sex part and not enough of the buddy. At any rate, it was too late to worry about it now.
I lied back down on the bed. The sheets were quite cold and damp now, and I didn’t feel so French anymore. If I were truly French, and not just a poser, who liked to sprinkle his conversation with French writers, I would have enjoyed my sorrow and looked forward to the next girl. I would have written a poem. Instead I thought about Linda and the series of twists and turns, and subways transfers that she would now be taking for the last time. Whether I had loved her or not, it was still very sad to think about the finality of it all.

      In most ways Linda was very replaceable. Five-foot two and bleached blonde, she was at thirty an uncomfortable six years older than me.  She had a British smile and perpetual zit in the center of her forehead.  An entity unto itself, that zit had spoken to me one night and told me not to take her too seriously.  Soul mates after all didn’t come six years older with big zits in their forehead now did they? No of course they didn’t.
       But now that Linda was gone, the thing that haunted me about her most was not that zit, but how funny she was.  Not just sarcastic funny or ‘ha ha now give your panties funny’, Linda had made me gut laugh.  She said that the zit on her forehead was the Eye of Allah, and that I should worship it; she woke me up in the morning by trying to suffocate me with a pillow like in her favorite movie One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest.  “You want breakfast?” she said in her best Jack Nicholson.  “You can’t handle breakfast!”  But then low and behold, she had made me breakfast.
     Because for all her insanity, Linda was nice too.  And when I think about it that might make her the only nice one I have ever dated.  She was the only one that never asked for cab money, or used our post coital talks as therapy sessions to drop bombs like “I haven’t had sex like that since I was five years old”.  No, Linda never did that.  She was cool.  In better hands she would have been girlfriend material.
      The only problem with Linda was that she was too smart. She figured me out in six easy lessons and made her exit, before I even had time to realize how great she was. Not that it would have made a difference in the ultimate outcome, but at least if I had known how great she was, I could have gone through the satisfying motions of trying to change myself for her.  I could have kept my mouth shut during sex for instance, and also during walks, and most especially during intimate talks.  I would have torn up my writings, and revealed only first and last name, if I had wanted to give myself the best chance. I was too young at the time; Linda was too cagey.
      Full credit to her, Linda was already well on her way to figuring out my little smoke and mirrors show on our second date.  That was when she pulled one of my poems out the garbage and read it out loud while I was changing Cds.  It was a sexy sort of poem that had gotten thrown out for sounding too much like a dirty limerick.  She laughed when she had read it and then put it back in the trash where it belonged.

—”You just write poems to get laid”, she had said with a laugh.
—”Pretty much”, I said.
—”I can’t believe how shallow you are.  I thought writers were supposed to be deep”.
—” They probably are.  I never said I was a writer”.
—” So what are you then?”
  I shrugged my shoulders
—”A pervert I guess”.
She laughed.
—”Just my luck”, she said.   “I think I’m sleeping with the next great French writer of our millennium, and he turns out to be another pervert.”
—”Could be worse”, I said.
      And of course it was.
Linda, if I could have told her, was sleeping with a man so polymorphously perverse, that ten months from now he would be in prison. Worse yet he would write a book in prison and include her real name in the intro.

Complete Urban Romance at http://www.lulu.com/content/363180
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