Reverie, part 4

I had been dreaming about bodies. I had been fantasizing about bodies. Women’s bodies. Their bodies, on their beds at night while I, their appendix before the operation (the operation will never happen), lay covered on their carpeted floor, with all the blankets in the world, listening to the sounds of trains passing over our heads while waiting for those sonorous moments when night noises would be broken by kisses that couldn't be stopped; they vibrated across the room to where I lay, waiting with dread and anticipation for their kisses (their skin pushing against each other) to reach my flesh like the night train’s whistle across the hills. Who were they? I was going to call them Gertrude and Alice, but their names are Crazy Cat and Mum. At least that’s what they called themselves when they make love. They were two of a trio. I was the third. They were two women with soft swellings; their love making was a collection of guttural and vocal signs sliding over each other; their bodies did not flab against one another. We used to share the bed together, three of us. Now I occasionally still sleep there, but only when they are not there. It was their finding their bodies for each other that gave me my body’s femininity; I became conscious of the existence of my woman’s body; I began to desire a woman’s body. But I did not know that I could desire a woman’s body. At first, the femininity of their sex overwhelmed me, only the more I am overwhelmed the deeper I delved. I could not run from them, just as I could not run from my body or my voice. I thought I desired their bodies, both the one that came before and the one that came after. Even their bodies together, in front of me. All of this prepared me for the experience of his body, which was not the first body I touch but it was the first body I felt through. Strangely, it was also a hypermasculine body, chiseled and hard, with the face of stone. I have never liked masculine bodies, let alone flesh of stone, but perhaps I had never experienced the body in itself for me before. Prior to him, bodies always existed to be in the world. When I touch, I always touch the being of that body and not it. Why wasn’t I ready to experience the isolation of a body in its sexuality before him? Perhaps because just before his arrival I had been broken by a masculine being inside a feminine male body (my heterosexuality was always based on the other’s femininity). With this prior-him, it was too much being (man) and no attention to the body—my body and his body, to the femininity that is embodied in both. Sex was just opening and entering, coming and leaving. Because he was so wrapped in his own being that I couldn’t touch any of him except his body, and even his body resisted me, because what good is a body if the being is not in it? How could I touch his body when what I wanted from him was not it? I had always made love to a man’s body, had only known a man’s body, but I had never like men’s bodies, their hardness, their genitals. I find the sight of it repulsive—men in boxer shorts; men in speedos, with their penises bulging as if it was a prize (which was not won), strutting in a manner that even goats would think it’s overdone. But let us go back to the stone body, in a little while.