Francisco, who wanted to introduce her to a man. “Tell me again about your friend, the man you want me to meet,” she said, “there’s no one here.” “He’s single, heterosexual, and interested in a lot of the same things you are, the same age, divorced,” her friend said. “What’s his phone number?” She called, they made a date, and here she was, a week and a half later.
Twenty-four hours after they’d gotten almost to sleep, she slept alone the next night. Now fully awake the next morning, she let the recent time with Josh flood her memory as she poured herself a cup of tea, watching the steam rise as she stirred her tea with a spoon. What she had particularly loved about sex with Josh was that it wasn’t over when he had come. No more than, many times later, it was over when she had come first. After a pause, they always started in again until each had come enough. Although she didn’t know it yet, one of the things that made their sex so good was that it gave him as much pleasure to make her come as it gave her to make him come. She looked beyond the patio doors to the flowering trees in the backyard, enjoying her recollection of that first night, a little more than a day ago.
His hand lightly tracing circles over her cunt brought her back. They lay together enjoying the feeling of having fucked their hearts out. She felt the cool of the wet spot on the sheets made by the mix of their fluids, and shifted her body a fraction to a drier spot. He moved with her, never breaking their contact. “You have to show me what you like,” he said, running a finger gently over her cunt lips, then veering toward her clit. She shuddered with pleasure, sensing the arch of her neck thrown back, the muscles of his hips and thighs. Lying there having her clit stroked and rubbed evoked a flood of images. Multiple screens flashed images of femmes fatales, discus throwers poised and bent to throw. She became a high-heeled, bejeweled, slinky-dressed femme, and he a tango-leading, tall and black-booted stud.
He moved his leg over hers, feeling her tense against him. “There, like that,” she managed. He touched her lightly at first, in teasing motions, making her move toward him, show him with the motion of her pelvis toward or away from his hand exactly what she wanted. “Harder,” she said, and he continued, rhythmically and more firmly. She moved under his touch onto plateaus of more and more pure pleasure until she couldn’t bear it any more, coming with an arch of her back and a moan that surprised her. “Oh, my God,” she said, pressing herself onto his hand, still coming. “Oh, baby, come,” he said, smiling over at her as she opened her eyes. “Oh, God, that was wonderful,” she said, kissing him on the lips. “Next time, I’ll bring my vibrator,” she said. “Fine, I’d like to meet it,” he said.
They lay together, quietly, kissing lightly, his hand cupping her cunt. What a beginning, she thought. I like him. Josh spooned her with his body, “Good night, baby,” he said. “Good night, love.” Unbeknownst to them, this was only the beginning.
LUST by Elfriede Jelinek
Translated by Michael Hulse
IN ALL SERIOUSNESS I call upon you: air and lust for one and all!
The woman will be with you in a moment, can you hold? First she has to collect herself: for a kiss it’d be best to be collected, all five senses, collect the set. The student is well developed, a perfect picture of a man, no need for touching up, so she lets him touch her up. He places his arm between her thighs. With his eye on the way ahead and the main chance, he rummages under her clothes, which consist chiefly of a plain dressing-gown, which won’t be in the way for long. Many have to take terrible buses and regret it terribly when they remain on the wrong genitals for too long. The owner, or rather the passenger of his three-in-one wishes, grows too used to us and won’t let us out of his ground-level hospitable apartment. Let me explain that three-in-one: woman is a trinity of pleasures, to be grabbed up top, down below, or in the middle! Till at length they can move on to various amiable kinds of sport, possessing each other without understanding. Bawling and bawling. The woman is eager for the driver to drive her around a little, step on it.
It can’t simply be because the toilet’s in the corridor that we feel impelled to go out at night and, in front of the door, look slyly around to see if anyone’s watching as we stand there with our hands on our sex, as if we might be due to lose it before we can place it in its hand-painted chipboard box.
Of the many kinds of accommodation he might choose, the young man opts for this one alone. But the closet won’t keep still, no, it’s even hurrying off ahead in the dark and the cold! This Gerti beats him to the enclosure. Many a one has talked of kissing here. Spread their torchlight wide. And cast great shadows on the walls, so that for one other person they will be greater than just anyone, just anyone on a ski lift. As if sheer carnal desire could make them greater, bigger! As if they could draw themselves up so erect that they’d slam the ball straight in the basket! Players can be mighty fine specimens, tall and erect, and there they stand before their partners, fully equipped, with all the necessary tackle. So many requirements, all of them pressing, pressed into the service of hygiene and filth alike, simply to possess each other. As the phrase inaptly goes. This dusty junk shop’s where we end up. Two household objects. Of simple geometrical design. Wanting to fit together and be good as new again! Now! Suddenly there’s a woman in combinations in the corridor, a jug of water in her hand; has she been casting spells, calling forth a storm, or is she only going to make some tea? In no time at all a woman can make a home of the plainest, barest, most spartan of places. That is to say, even the plainest of women can make a man feel at home by baring all, in no time he places his spar. This young man who has entered her life might be the great intellectual? Now everything will be different from how it was planned. We’ll make a new plan on the spot. Our heads will swell good and proper. Oh, your boy plays the violin as well? But not at this very moment, surely, since no one’s punching his start button.
Come on, she yells to Michael. As if she were demanding money of a shopkeeper who hates us customers. And yet he can’t get by without us. He has to tempt us into his store or go penniless. Now the woman wants a pleasure that lasts at last. First of all, one! two! (you can do it too, sitting in your car, your speed as limited as your mental horizons) we lunge at each other’s mouths, then we plunge into all the other orifices; in thy orifices may I be remembered. And all of a sudden our partner means everything to us. Presently, in a minute or two, Michael will penetrate Gerti, whom he hardly knows and has barely taken a look at. Just as a sleeping car attendant always knocks first with a hard object. He lifts the woman’s dressing-gown over her head and with his mouth, in an excitement of his own creation, prompts her who was without form and void to make a frightful commotion in the queue. The queue at the cash desk where we’re all waiting, money clenched and balled behind our flies. We are our own worst enemies in matters of taste. People all like different things, isn’t that so? But what if we want to be liked? What will we do, in our infinite indolence: call upon sex to do the work for us?
Michael yanks the woman’s legs about him like the legs of hightension masts. In his exploratory zeal he gives intermittent attention to her undouched cleft, a gnarled version of what every other woman has on her person in a discreet shade of lavender or lilac. He pulls back and takes a good look at the place where he is repeatedly disappearing, only to reappear, a huge great thing, fun for one and all. A funster, this fellow. But flawed. Sport being one of his flaws, and hardly the least. The woman is calling him. What’s got into him? Why hasn’t it got into her? Since Gerti didn’t have an opportunity to wash, her hole looks murky, as if it were plastic-coated. Who can resist jamming a finger in (you can use peas, lentils, safety pins or marbles if you like), try it and see what an enthusiastic response you’ll get from your lesser half. Woman’s unyielding sex looks as if it were unplanned. And what is it used for? So that Man can tussle with Nature, and the children and grandchildren have somewhere to come trailing their clouds of glory from. Michael scrutinizes Gerti’s complicated architecture and yells like a stuck pig. As if he were dissecting a corpse, he seizes her hairy cunt, stinking of secret dissatisfaction and dissatisfied secretions, and buries his face in it. You tell a horse’s age by the teeth. This woman isn’t so young any more either, but nonetheless this wrathful bird of prey is flapping at her door.
Michael laughs: he’s terrific. Will we ever learn from these transactions? Will the one ever be able to cross the gap to the other, to talk and be understood and understand? Women’s genitals, so outrageously located in a hillside, tend to be quite distinct, claims the expert. Just as no two people are entirely alike. They can wear quite different headgear, for instance. And the ladies are particularly prone to difference. No two of them are entirely alike. Not that a lover cares, when they lie prone: what he sees is what he’s used to seeing on other women. In the mirror he sees himself reflected, his own deity. In the waters’ depths. Fishing, plenty of fish in the sea, just hang out your dripping rod and wait for a catch, another woman to toss off your godhead in and then toss back.
