inspo/sex
Lauren Elkin,
Jonathan Franzen,
Lisa Taddeo,
Elaine Dundy
sex scenes that are not too cringe
Boys her own age wanted something, but they didn't seem to know exactly what. Boys her own age wanted approximately. Her function— the role she'd played on more than one lousy date—was to help them learn more specifically what they wanted, to unbutton her shirt and give them suggestions, to (as it were) flesh out their rather rudimentary ideas.
Don Armour wanted her minutely, inch by inch. She appeared to make brilliant sense to him. Simply possessing a body had never much helped her, but seeing it as a thing that she herself might want—imagining herself as Don Armour on her knees, desiring the various parts of herself—made her possession of it more forgivable. She had what the man expected to find. There was no anxiety to his location and appreciation of each feature.
When she unhooked her bra, Don bowed his head and shut his eyes.
"What is it?"
"A person could die of how beautiful you are."
This she liked, yes.
Her feeling when she took him in her hands was a preview of her feeling a few years later, as a young cook, when she handled her first truffles, her first foie gras, her first sacs of roe.
[...] She was ready to go home.
Two nights before they left, she knocked on Brian's door before dinner and he pulled her into his room and kissed her.
He'd given no warning of his change of heart. She visited the confessor in her head and was able to say, "Nothing! I did nothing! I knocked on the door, and next thing I know, he's on his knees."
On his knees, he pressed her hands to his face. She looked at him as she'd looked at Don Armour long ago. His desire brought cool topical relief to the dryness and crackedness, the bodywide distress, of her person. She followed him to bed.
The individuals involved can rarely tell you the precise moment. That’s because it’s impossible. One would have to admit seeking something that feels unsavory, alien. A husband who desires to enter another body, to hold another breast. A wife who wants to see her husband want someone else, so that she may want him as much as she’d like to. A third person who is not frankly loved in the world, who enters a room as a cipher in a tank top. A husband who makes the first move. A wife who closes her eyes to the first move. A third person who has eaten nothing all day. Someone turns on the music. Someone pours a drink. Someone reapplies lipstick. Someone positions her body in such a way. Someone is less hurt than he should be. Someone is afraid of her carnality. Someone is worried about not being sexual enough. Someone lights a candle. Someone closes a French door. Someone’s stomach drops. It is everything to do with bodies and it is nothing at all to do with bodies.
After he left I started to cry. Then I fell asleep again. At two o’clock I woke up, suddenly remembering I’d made a date with Judy’s Frenchman, the painter Claude Tonnard.
He took me to his studio, poured me out some perfectly ghastly tea and we looked at his paintings a while. Then, as if it was the only thing left to do, he made love to me.
The studio was dark and cold when I left. I felt experienced without feeling that I, personally, had been through anything. I’d really shocked myself, to tell you the truth. I was a long way from St. Louis. My past was receding a little too rapidly.
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he pulled me to her; her hips were narrow. My hand slid down into her panties. It was a new jungle, new wildlife. She sighed. The feel of her, this private softness, was incredible. I remember thinking, This is not really going to happen — is it?
Her mouth was on me. She reached for something, some kind of cream; it started cold and then went warm. She stroked me, looking me straight in the eye. And then again her mouth was on me and there was no way of saying no. She pulled my trousers out from under, quickly had me down and was upon me, riding me. It was like nervous heaven. I exploded.
His name is Weisz, like vice, and he is that, a wicked indulgence and something that grips me. I’ve never had such big hands on my body. We sit together in his office and he plays me his records and then he puts his hands on my body.
I am in love with him, I am in love with his shirt, with the way that it sits just so lightly on his torso, his collar that sits away just so from his neck. I’ve never actually wanted to rip someone’s clothes off before. He has a wife at home so I have to be careful or she’ll be wondering why all the buttons on his shirt popped off at the same time.
Desire makes us others to ourselves, the maestro says, and he is right, I am not myself when I desire Max, I am myself-with-Max, quite another person from myself when I’m without him.
Max went with me to see the maestro today, at the faculté de droit. He spoke before, I don’t know, a couple hundred people, mostly students training to be analysts, but also scholars in other fields, and even, I heard, some actors. He’s a man of science who speaks like a mystic. Every word has its weight, as if he were dropping iron plumbs into a sea to anchor his thoughts. He delivers his speech like he’s performing Molière at the Comédie-Française. It is often hard to follow. Today he talked about jouissance, and love, and the Other, and I stroked the inside of Max’s wrist with my finger, afraid to outright hold his hand, and then the maestro said there is no woman, and that it is the instinct of the mother that prevails in her, not her own sexual pleasure, which turns around the phallus, and that man cannot enjoy woman’s body because he is too busy enjoying his own enjoyment, and while I have known men like that, indeed sex with Henry has sometimes felt like that, it has not always been so, and I wrote it all down and put a question mark next to it and Max shrugged and I wanted to talk to him about it afterward but afterward he took me back to his office and I forgot all about the maestro and whether or not there are women with their own sexual desires because I was inside my desire, and soon Max was too.
jesus
Clémentine comes over every day, and some days we sleep together, and some days we try not to but end up fucking anyway. It has happened; we need each other now. I need her, I am able to say, but I don’t understand this need, I have never been with a girl before, never knew I wanted a girl, until I wanted her, her body in her mesh bra, her mesh panties, my fingers on her, in her, learning what to do, afraid of being wrong, letting myself be led, it feels right, we keep going. Her hipbone in the morning light. Her body contracting under mine. My body one muscle that contracts and releases and contracts again, under her tongue, her fingers, her thighs. I think fleetingly of Jonathan, wonder is this a way to be close to him again, or was it always about Clémentine, this whole time? I try to turn my questions off. No what does this mean. It means in and of itself; alone it has meaning.
We don’t say things like I am yours and you are mine, we don’t make plans beyond the following weekend, where we’ll eat, where we’ll walk. We are each pinned in our situations; we couldn’t afford to run away together and we know it without discussing it. All her radical politics, her Deleuzian critique of psychoanalysis, can’t spring us free.