Adam Fieled (Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania, USA): "Proven"
You might not want to call us scoundrels, for the time we
spent basking in the glow of the foreign. Cheating Montreal
meant being there in the midst of their brief, two-month
summer. Our second-floor garret room, not up to bed
& breakfast level but also private, secluded from any kind
of staff or maintenance person, under the aegis of God
knows what or who, directly overlooked Saint Catherine Street.
No air conditioning; the mornings were sticky. Mary had
a number of brisk mornings in a row, long agendas of where
to go, what to do all day already planned. But on one sultry
morning, she tried to access the fuse-box of purposeful,
assertive day-momentum, and failed. What happened
instead was nothing unusual— the re-consummation of our
marriage, into the exotic earth around and beneath us—
but it changed our dynamic permanently. It always meant
that our thoughts of who we had been and what we had done
together could go skyward at any moment, even once we
were no longer together. There was nothing about who we
had been that could be erased. The consummation ceremony—
slow, languorous, in bright morning sunshine striking
the queen-size bed occupying the center of a space uncarpeted,
wood-slat floors, walk-in shower, no bath (and certainly no
Continental breakfast waiting for us)— did its milestone number.
If it was done Bohemian-style, it was a raw, as usual, version
of Bohemia we channeled. At the end of the day, nothing to
romanticize, just the sense that Mary’s camera caught her at
an absolute zenith of body/soul unity, just as she wished.
Our time in bed was a deep breath we took together. And proven.
Because you could cut paper with Anastasia’s cheek-bones,
& her wide hips supported no flab at all, & not to say
her carriage announced any movements but a feline strut,
a surfeit of attention is what she was used to. She paced
the polished wooden Highwire floors, knocked
back red wine, huffed nitrous, & put up the requisite
inaccessible, impervious front to those foolhardy enough
to believe they could approach her. I, for instance,
knew the ropes, & had too much to do anyway. Except,
at some point in one fateful night’s festivities, all the junk
in Anastasia’s brain, everything frozen, lazy-loafing,
shy of approach, froze— nights spent following other people
around, waiting to be signaled, signals sent back registering
ranking, surfeits of attention delivering not love but lust—
caught up with her at last, & she exploded. Gaetan
was exasperated to find her sitting in one of the windows
of the gallery’s west-facing façade, threatening to jump.
Gaetan was a cool customer, but spur him with something
unhinged, he would warp into warrior mode, brusquely
brush off those inexpert, & set to work. We all watched
as Gaetan leveled with Anastasia, whose drunkenness
was not helping her, leading her to understand that
the situation was hardly hopeless. She had a real life,
friends, purpose, & everyone here cared about her.
The party, as an entirety, you would think ceased, yet
it did not. Not all the revelers realized the drama unfolding.
Even those who did drunkenly chose to trust Gaetan. I
did, too, was right to. Philly fixed Jersey that night, as was its wont.
Adam Fieled (Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania, USA): "Repertoire"
In the repertoire or array of arts and tricks developed
by Mary in her childhood and adolescence, only an
onlooker with eagle eyes could distinguish what emerged
as, possibly, the most important one. Mary got off, as they
say, on swings back and forth on paradoxes and dichotomies.
My mind teetered through this terrain about her insides as I
chanted out, through gritted teeth, the abstruse formulas of
the Bringing Down the Light ritual I had thoughtfully included
in our luggage. Mary rocked back and forth on our adequate,
if not luxuriant, bed, here in this garret room on Saint Catherine
Street. She was distraught; naked but for her panties; we’d just
seen sights in the neighborhood she found harrowing, a barroom
brawl, the spilling of a pool of actual blood; we were alone in a
foreign country. It jumped up in my blood uncomfortably that Mary
was a sucker for the wasted elegance of a nice, cozy hospitalization.
In a foreign country no less, far from the usual support systems. So, I chanted,
accompanied it with the requisite hand and arm movements, as dictated
by the file I’d downloaded once I’d received the key from the Thelemic
Order of the Golden Dawn. How Mary learned, in an avatar-like way,
to tune in on raw energy frequences, rather than fixating on rituals
that had to focus on Jesus and the Bible, I don’t know. It was the sense,
as a girl, that the world inside her, starting with colors and forms, was
just too huge to be encompassed by any one belief or value system.
It was an intense desire for the polyglot fluency of a mind that could
find dichotomies to ride— flesh/spirit, abstinence/consummation—
anywhere. As Bringing Down the Light concluded, I noted that Mary
was healed. The raw energy frequency of the script saw us through—
I’d pulled up heads that Mary’s repertoire (heathen/believer) responded.
Heather is easily misinterpreted. She goes to bed with me for complex reasons: because she has pity for this underling artist, who tries so hard to be recognized; because this underling artist gives her treats (a public forum for her own underling art); because she finds him hard to resist after a few drinks; and because, lo and behold, she is genuinely aroused by what happens when these things are investigated. I don’t have many interpretations of Heather; she’s average height, average weight, a face more handsome than beguilingly pretty (sort of a WASP Frida Kahlo, heavy eyebrows, thick lips, dark hair that rides her head in waves). But what happens in bed is so climactic that it takes us beyond our self-serving interpretations. This is a woman who gives; every inch of her is covered in desire, which can (and must) be fulfilled. Heather likes sex more than any other woman I’ve slept with. She screams, bites, moans, and there is such a delicious fluidity to her movements that, despite her near-homeliness, I am moved to do the same thing. Heather is teaching me how rare it is to find a partner who loves these processes, who makes sex a manifestation of spiritual generosity. We’re both almost thirty; I’ve never seen someone who contains both the generosity and the sense of comfort Heather has in the physical act.
In this favorite game, and when youth is involved, women often hold the cards. Heather has decided that we will have two nights, no more. There is something in me that wants and needs her too much. She is too touched, too moved. It’s safer just to flush the thing. I don’t particularly realize this, as we sit at the Cherry Street Tavern. All I know is an anxious feeling that I’m going on a trip and Heather is giving me a warm goodbye. It is a trip involving my art and my sense is that I’m going to get killed. Heather, she knows privately, is about to kill me too. She puts in her diaphragm and when I come, it is an exquisite lunge into some variant of heaven. Her intake of breath tells me that she is getting my stream. She might even be frightened that the diaphragm is punctured. Amidst all the peace and its benignity is the sense that things are getting out of hand. This is unsanctioned intercourse, out of mutual dependence; Heather feels this too much. So that, when I get back from my ten days in New England (where I have, in fact, been killed), Heather is nowhere to be found. That part of her that took my streams is loathe to take any more, too happy, too at peace. I learn that Heather represents that great portion of humanity that wants to be in pain. Ecstasy is a dead end street; it is too unreliable, too jumpy. Heather now goes for guys that give her the manner and form of the pain she wants, and not too much of the nice stuff.
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