Lover Come Home Ch. 08

Letter 8

Sunday

Dear V

I am not dead or jealous, just angry. I am going to punish you in this letter, and myself too for being angry when I have no right to be. You cannot help your travels, but I am royally pissed anyway. Last night I did something I do not like to do. Neither do you. We will both suffer by my telling of it. It seems appropriate.

I made love to myself.

Like most people I learned how as a child. Put your hands down there and rub. That feels good. Not hard to learn. Or swing your legs hard when you're bored in school. If you hold your thighs close together that feels good too. Ever notice how many grown women still do it? Or find something that sticks out at about the right height, like the armrest of an upholstered chair, and work away at it. I abandoned this one when I grew too tall. By that time I was expert in other ways.

Much later I used to watch old, pierogi-shaped women in a public bathhouse. The water jet in the hip bath was their undoing. The look on their faces was always one of pure bliss. Did their men know nothing? A water jet better than a man? But finally I tried it and it wasn't half bad. Certainly easy.

Hard is coming on a horse. It isn't just their big brown eyes that make little girls love horses. The rocking motion of riding and the angle at which the saddle spreads your legs makes it a natural to get yourself well and truly rubbed. But it takes skill not to fall off when you come.

When one is older, more sophisticated, and more needy, one turns to mechanical devices. I hate them. Too much of a good thing. Speedy and totally without feeling. Even the armchair loved me more than the god damned things I've tried. I don't come, I go off. Like a rocket aimed at the ground.

You, of course, are above all this misery. You find anything but the real thing, lovemaking not fucking, to be ridiculous and unsatisfying.

I cannot imagine you masturbating. I've never asked what you did as a little boy. Did the nuns tell you your fingers would sprout long hair if you did? Did you believe them? I think you did nothing, just kept your serious nose in a book, fantasizing adventures with you as the hero.

I used to try to pretend that someone else was really doing what I was doing to myself. I would finger my breasts, stroke my thighs, fan my pubic hair in as seductive way as I could manage. No luck. No suspension of disbelief. Other women may be able to imagine phantom lovers, but I know better. It was me doing the stroking and the fanning and the fingering. Finally I stopped the faux foreplay forever.

Instead I start with the clitoris, where good things usually end. I find it with my index finger, covered with Vaseline. Vaseline smells like false feelings to me. But I use it because it helps. Whatever gets you through the night, like the rock and roll singers scream.

The goal is to get it up and running, so to speak. It took me only a few seconds last night. Just round and round with my greasy finger and up my clitoris came, bigger, rounder, poking its head up asking for more. You know what it looks like, what it tastes like, what it feels like, what it smells like. Me, I just know when it is throbbing. Your knowledge is deeper than mine. But when the bang bang starts, I go on to other things. My vagina, which is empty, but not for long. Three fingers go in easily, so I try for four and succeed. This is just low rent as far I'm concerned. But it works. I don't even need anymore Vaseline. My damn body can't even seem to tell the difference between my fingers and your penis.

My thumb is still free, so I put it to use massaging the clitoris again. It's the clit, not my clit, I refuse to consider it as really a part of me. It has its own life, I don't try to tell it what to do.

Does it come? Yes. It's more like an electric shock than an orgasm, but it comes, and goes. Good riddance. In need of some human contact, something that feels like home, I clutch my ....what? There is no good word for it. Snatch? Box? Pussy? Ugly words all of them, and I know no others. I hang onto myself like a dying woman, and fall asleep.

Punishment completed. Making love to myself is impossible. It takes two to make love. Anything else is just a hope not a truth. I won't try it again.

Anger gone, loneliness back.

C.