Max, the blind guy (a novel by Mark Beyer)
We meet again. Not
five days have passed. Tomorrow Janey starts ballet practice. We
could have waited but I’d promised my daughter, and Greta, that the
family would go together to the first practice. We’d meet the
instructor, make Jane feel comfortable, perhaps say a few words to
other parents because Corinne was the only face (with her rabbit
eyes) from the neighborhood.
Jools smoked some
grass before she led me to her bedroom, as a mistress leads her
Friday-night gigolo. She said to me, “Make me come with your mouth
and I’ll reward you.” Who is this woman? I asked myself,
though it was a far off sound, like the edges of thunder. Our history
was equally distant; she might have been a new person to me, an
unknown woman before last week. I took off her panties and forgot to
say something profound; a simple “thank you” would have done well
enough. I’d say something later. Just then my mouth was full.
I felt I was living
among the bucolics of Virgil, or the ravagers found populating Ovid’s
tales, and Chaucer’s travelers. These were the first thoughts that
afternoon as I ate Jools’s pussy, which got sugary wet as she
breathed heavily but didn’t thrash. I thought of a reply, and made
it short, the ending muffled by the folds of her vagina covering my
mouth. Then she came and, in the middle of that rush and flood, I
pushed my tongue as far into her as I could, which made me snort like
a pig. Jools laughed and lifted her legs, up high and back. The view
brought me to my knees. She’d left a puddle, my mouth was sore, my
face damp and sticky. I dropped my pants to my ankles.
“Look what you’ve
done,” I said, and pointed. “Now you’ll have to kiss him until
he cries.”
Jools rolled forward
onto her knees and elbows, gripped my cock between her hands to make
the head grow purple with a few squeezes. “Does he cry a lot?”
she asked.
I panted out a
reply. “Like a bawling brat.”
She squeezed and
stroked. “Then he’ll need to be punished.” And here she
addressed my penis. “Nothing to worry about, my lovely one. I’ll
console you afterwards.”
Unsteady on my
knees, I held her shoulder for control. “You’re a good woman.”
“Let’s wait and
see,” Jools hissed. She slid her mouth over my cock and I watched
it disappear. I thought, What a hungry slut! It was not a
damning word. I’d thought of a few worse ones for myself between
the four days we’d been apart. A moment later I pushed her back on
the bed and sank my cock deep on the first thrust because all of that
juice would be the cushion to her pain. She didn’t yelp, only a
moan, and then others. They sounded out the letters F-U-N — F-U-N —
F-U-N. My regret was that the first real smile on my face all week
was lost in the softness of her neck.
A third and fourth
meeting, then a fifth &etc on into the weeks that followed. We
call our hours episodes: our time is short, filled with
sex and only sex; episodes of fantasy and insanity. Bedcovers come
down, clothes are tossed to the floor. The touch of our skin only
feeds the cravings we have discovered for each other. We hardly speak
beforehand—mere bawdy drivel that comes from trysts; you’ve heard
these, made them up yourself I’m sure—and afterwards we talk of
the little-much-else that lives outside these walls. We laugh
from under our warm duvet at the world: art and business and Chicago
and the bits left to us after we have drained our loins of their
tantalizing urges, drained to the point that we dare not touch the
over-sensitized pink & purple parts.
I park in the same
street and walk, unaware of the world, to her door, touch her button,
and slip upstairs into a world of our choosing. Her house is always
warm—it turned cold outside early, before the winter solstice, and
early-dark afternoons, arrived—always clean floors and freshly laid
sheets, a joint ready for us in the ashtray, food and bread on the
kitchen island “for later” that is sometimes, not always,
indulged upon. With each episode I take the time to notice Jools,
what she looks like, where she enjoys my hands before, during, and
afterwards. I have time to see her because, as furious as these hours
have turned into, my mind grows accustomed to the pace; I learn to
slow down the events, each move of an arm, hand, hip, leg, lips. I
can watch her—and myself, when I so desire.
Jools had always
been a heavy woman who believed in her body, its heft. She wasn’t
so big, back when I worked the cash register and watched her sell
paint kits to kids. She’s taller than I am by an inch, and broader
in the shoulders and hips. Her size is not something created from
fat, or excess sports-muscle gone to seed; she’s merely a big woman
with a proper frame to carry her. She is so unlike Greta that I find
it unnecessary to compare them. The “variety of two” came to my
mind about a month after we began our affair, on a night when I had
gone home and, after showering, disappeared into my studio for a
couple hours. I returned late to the house and found Greta in the
bedroom, reading a book. I mauled her with kisses and my love for
her, trying to interest my wife in sex, which she fought but not
fiercely (only enough to put me off), and I made her hot with my
fingers and lips, my tongue finding for a few moments her pink seam,
my hands holding onto her skinny ass, my shoulders pushing up between
her short legs, lifting them high and hooking her knees over my
shoulders; holding her like this while I licked her, which earned me
a deep moan so familiar I almost called out in answer (“Hi there!”)
while her hands continued to pull at my hair, those little hands and
slight, thin fingers with the bitten nails that could no longer
scratch me. She remembered something then—I felt it in her body as
a jolt—and she pushed at me to get away—get me away—which I
finally did but not gladly, knowing only that this was the beginning
of “a new us” and I would have my wife back soon. She couldn’t
resist for very long because we were together in bed each night and I
had become more adamant at the same time as I was far more tender,
and, I think, from the look in her eye, she didn’t want to resist
any longer. Maybe she knew something I hadn’t given her the credit
for figuring out. And … but back to Jools, whose heft felt good
when she was on top of me, her long thick fingers and those nails
doing their work on my scalp, down my chest, on my inner thighs and
around the horn, if I may coin a phrase. Her hair is a bundle,
a mop, a dark silky mop that catches in my fingers when I try to draw
my hand through its long loops. She washes it before we meet and
sometimes it is still damp. I explore her head, find many gray hairs,
wonder if she finds as many on me. Her ears are not large, and lie
flat against her head, which is odd, mutant, sci-fi-ish, but
no matter. The feet pearly and smooth, a corn on the outside of one
pinky toe; I kiss this. Her breasts are pillows, dough pillows, which
she likes me to knead but not too hard, and for me to play with her
nipples, wash-boarding under my fingers, licked and sucked by my
tongue and lips. There’s an orgasm lurking under such manipulation,
but she doesn’t let me finish. The demand for me to fill her cunt
with cock is always on top of this wave, this unsteady jiggling of
big tits that I hold between my hands and agitate, vibrate, make them
animate objects that simmer my desire.
(It feels good to
speak this way, a calamity of language and story; I’ve been alone
too long, held in silence beyond my nature — or that which is good
for health. My concentration to balance over a canvas must be a
religion, with all its warnings and restrictions. It’s my yoke. A
torturous salvation.)
Jools is older than
me, and being beyond forty she shows some minor lines at the corners
of her eyes and mouth, two deeper lines beginning between her
eyebrows and taking three branches up to the middle of her forehead.
The littlest lines—capillary width—crease along her top and
bottom lips. She’s not a sun lover, the bane of most women’s
wrinkle fears, so they are worry lines, or work lines. I recalled the
effort she put into paper making, breaking down the material to
fibers for her artisan papers using her strong hands, pulping it and
working her arms to make a mash of the cotton and various textile
bits, celluloid wood pulp, even the slut’s wool found under beds.
Her muscles worked and her breasts swayed; those thighs beat like
pistons, her arms made moist with that pasty gruel. Above all of this
was that face of hers, working through emotions. Had she been
thinking about me then? I remembered that I had thought of her,
sometimes, but there was no time, then, and no need for that kind of
desire. The days we have together now are episodes of unguarded
excess—which is an oxymoron because isn’t taking something to
excess already an unguarded act? I laughed at our urgency.
When our sexual
energy wore down, we traded words in the daylight up towards the
ceiling or into a warm chest that rose and fell with easy breaths.
She told me of her childhood, stories I had not heard before. The big
white house in the Sauganash neighborhood, where there was only
herself to roam and explore its three floors and various nooks.
Solitude. Nothing to share. Few friends, and those only-children too.
It made me think of my own lonely childhood (brothers or not, I’d
been isolated through my own personality), and how I missed having
the posse of friends with whom I could widely explore our leafy-tree
and sunny-happy neighborhood; I remembered such groups of boys I’d
seen across the backyards, or from a window while I was drawing in a
book those thousand cubes which I thought so clever. Our mutual
storytelling never lasted long.
We wanted to make
our own stories, or at least memories. We called them fuck-fables.
(from pages 144-45 digital ed.)
Buy this story of Euro-travel and tragedy at GoogleBooks.
KOBO Digital Books has this very American story.
Available from Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk
#lovestories, #realcharacters #traditionalnovel #americanwriter #goodfiction #goodread #thelongread #darkstories #sophisticatedfiction #novelsforsmartpeople #fictionthatstirs #beautiful-prose #lovelustrevenge #loveasitis #markbeyerauthor #booknews #librarybooks #libraryfiction