More from Equations (Thesis: Julie Hayes)

Time and sex: sex chronology is not linear. Sex and time are both conversant with strange leaps. It is the first day of the first class I will ever teach. Julie looks at me with big round black eyes, soulfully. She has long wavy black hair and her looks are dark, foreboding. We often want what wants us; Julie makes a habit of following me, from the classroom to the subway, from the subway to the Last Drop. As a student, she’s haphazard. What she teaches me is that when someone follows you, they can make you follow them; on the walk home from the Drop, I realize my mind is following her, into her apartment, onto her bed, underneath the sheets, underneath her folds, into her little stomach. But I can’t. So I let her follow me, knowing that this will lead (eventually) to a culminating moment. My hunger is for continuance. Julie wants the thrill of picking up a hot potato and dropping it back into the pot. But these early weeks are all titillation, so that every soulful look to me is the countenance of continuance, has endurance written into it. Is this my wife? Marriages have been initiated in stranger fashions. Julie is as pale as Marie, but much flintier, so I know strife will be a feature of my daily existence, after we are married. I think this as I stand before the class, discoursing on Chaucer, gazing at this little wife of Bath.

…………………………………………………………………………………………………............................

The semester is over, almost. I am making a pact with Satan to get away with this. It is all fine and feisty as I bite the bullet, walk the knife edge, get in touch with my renegade parts. But I never lose sight of the hunger for permanence, which is by no means Julie’s. Her hunger is just to have what cannot be had, so that she can be a special person. Two hungers collide into nakedness, and neither seems to care that they don’t coalesce. We are separate via our separate hungers, and human in our desperate need to pursue them, singularly, and only marginally together. Her apartment is a mess, but with high ceilings, who cares? So we climb into our bed of separate hungers and square off. I learn nothing because I do not see what her hunger is. I think she’s just like me. Of course, she wants what I want. Of course, she thinks, he wants what I want, to do something to make himself a special person. What neither knows is that we’re both not special, we are both (and more than we realize), lusterless in our separate lusts. There is no innocence lost because raw hungers remain innocent until proven otherwise. You can pound away a hunger, but each thrust by no means puts you deeper into the other person. You move deeper into privations of private passions, unexpressed. But Julie looks so young and callow that I don’t notice these things. This, I think, is the beginning; but Julie has already become a special person, and wants a way out. We sleep topless in the May heat.

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………...................

Something holds Julie back so that there can’t be too much of this. While I am with her, she controls everything, from my sensations to my destiny. She can bite me off, permanently cripple me, or please me if she wants. As master, she decides how much hunger she will or will not assuage. She uses her hands as well as her mouth, doing little twists like she’s learned to do from Internet porn. It’s delicious, my legs shake from the unbearable nature of the sensations. The problem is, she then freezes, which means she is deliberately effacing my most overwhelming pulses. So I come in her frozen, static mouth, with a sense of intense anti-climax, and I am too bashful to instruct her as to how to do this properly. Yet any woman who brings me to this must be a darling and an angel. Julie, this darling angel, stands on the threshold of womanhood, and her hunger is merely to control. There is no sense of service, and since we are in my apartment there is no sense of comfort for her. What she wants to take home with her is a sense of having bested me. As she gazes at my closed eyes and opened mouth, there is (I imagine now) a sense of bitterly held contempt for my weakness, my humanity. We never fuse our different stupidities, so that I see no depths in those rounded eyes of jet, and she knows that she has now gotten what she wants from me; there is no more specialness.

© Adam Fieled 2011