other clothes he rarely wears, which is what he’d actually intended. He stares at her cleft. This is familiar territory now. When she looks away, because she cannot bear his scrutiny and the groping, pinching hands that examine her, he hits her. He wants to see and do everything. He has a right to. There are details you can’t see, and, in the event of there being a next time, a flashlight would come in handy. Before going in out of the night to the bodywork repairs shop. This woman had best learn to take the lordand-master’s examination of her sex. And not hang her feelings on his peg. For thereby hangs a tale.
Hay cascades over her, warming her slightly. The master is finished. The woman’s wound is throbbing and swollen. Retracting his instrument abruptly, Michael signals that he wants to retire to the tidy quarters of his own body. Already he has become a platform for this woman, from which she will speak on the subject of her longing and his long thing. Thus, without so much as being photographed in underwear and framed, one can become the centre-piece of a well-appointed room. This young man created the white and awe-inspiring mountains of flesh before him. Like the evening sun, he has touched that face with red. He has taken a lease on the woman, and as far as she’s concerned he can now grope under her dress whenever he likes.
Gerti covers Michael with soft and downy kisses. Soon she will return to her house and her lord and master, who has qualities of his own. For we always wish to return to the place of our old wounds and tear open the gift wrapping in which we have disguised the old as the new, to conceal it. And our declining star teaches us nothing at all.
UNTITLED by Paul Mayersberg
GREG AWOKE TO the fact that he was going nowhere. He didn’t think of himself as an imprecise man, but by his thirty-fifth birthday he was still without a defined career in the movies. He had had a long sequence of odd jobs: as a floor runner, assistant location manager, unit driver. He had no flat to call his own. He stayed with friends, rented when he could afford it, house sat, squatted.
His relationship with women had proved equally short-lived and imprecise. Greg had not found what he wanted in a woman. When he examined the long sequence of girls he had had he could not find a common denominator. Not in age or appearance or lifestyle. With women, like work, he took what he could get. Nothing lasted. There was no pattern to any of it. Sexually he was without direction.
Greg was naturally an optimistic man but now he gave in to depression. He found himself in a flat without a television and where the phone had been cut off. His dole cheque had stopped since he had been out of work for six months. For cash work, he went from door to door in good neighborhoods, knocking on doors, offering to wash cars parked in the street. His only evening solace was masturbation.
Looking for stimulation he rummaged through the two-room flat for books with sexy passages, old fashion magazines, women’s clothes catalogues. Underwear, swimwear, skin beauty products. The place, left empty for the summer by an acquaintance of an acquaintance, had obviously been occupied by one or two women. Among the magazines, books, junk mail and bills Greg found a typed manuscript, a screenplay.
The front page read UNTITLED. There was no author’s name but there was a date. The work was four years old. Greg started to read. It brought him back to his imagined career in films. “Untitled” was an erotic story in the style popular a few years back.
Two working girls, sharing a flat with one bedroom, took it in turns to bring their boyfriends home for the night. One night, one of the boyfriends came out of the bedroom at three in the morning and climbed into the sofa bed in the sitting room to set about seducing the other girl, while her friend was asleep.
To begin with it looked like a story of betrayal, but then it turned out that the girls had pre-arranged it. They had embarked on a programme of sharing their men. But without telling them. The next day the girls compared notes on the sexual performance of the boyfriends.
Greg read the script right through at a sitting. It was clear to him that one or other or both the girls had written it as an account of their own experience in this flat. The sofa he was now sitting on as he read it was the sofa-bed referred to on page 18 where Rick first put his hand inside Annie’s pajama top. Annie had protested to begin with but not too vehemently. She enjoyed his attentions. She let him take off her pajama trousers. She allowed him to touch and kiss any part of her. But wouldn’t let him enter her. That, she told him, would be too much. After all, he was Kate’s boyfriend and Kate was her friend.
Reading this, Greg found himself sharing Rick’s frustration. He put the script aside and relieved himself of the tension.
On page 27, four days later in the story, Annie allowed Rick to come between her breasts. On page 29 Kate laughed when Annie told her at breakfast, after Rick had gone, how she insisted that he lick the sperm from her skin. Otherwise, she said, she would never let him touch her again. Rick had not enjoyed the experience. It made him feel sick. Greg was with Rick on this. It made him feel queasy.
On page 31 Kate encouraged Rick to come in her mouth. Which he did. Then she kissed him open-mouthed and pushed his come back into his own mouth. She asked him to swallow it. After all, she had on several occasions. Greg’s throat contracted. He felt himself gag.
Greg’s sex life, his lovemaking, had been very conventional. He had read of these games but had never played them himself. The effect of reading and re-reading “Untitled” was to make him recognize that he had been as imprecise about his sexual life as he had been about his film career. In both he had taken more or less what was on offer. He had not sought more. Like Rick, he had a low expectancy of himself. Perhaps low self-esteem was the reason for his non-career.
Greg read the script countless times. He came to know it by heart. He never for one moment considered whether it was good or bad as art or craft. It was enough that it stimulated him. He lived the scenes from “Untitled” in the flat where they happened. He lay in the bed where Annie’s boyfriend, Alec, had covered his full condom with KY jelly and entered her anus. Greg had never found a girl who wanted him to attempt this. But so real was the scene to him that he bought some KY jelly with his food money in order to re-create the event exactly. It did not seem strange to him, masturbating inside a condom, when he could have done it without, without the expense of buying the thing. The point was, for those few minutes he, Greg, became Alec.
For three weeks Greg’s fantasies did not depart from the script as written. He muttered the dialogue as he re-created the scenes. It wasn’t masturbation as he had known it. He was shooting and re-shooting the script. One time he was Alec. Another, he was Rick.
Then, whether out of boredom through repetition, or through a half-conscious desire to go further, he transferred his sensuality to the girls, to what they were feeling. Until now Kate and Annie had been undefined, unspecific girls. He had imagined their limbs, their breasts, their movements, but not their faces. The script itself had not been specific about their appearance. They were in their twenties. They had hair. They did things. They talked. But it was all very general.
For the first time, it dawned on Greg that “Untitled” was not a very good screenplay. It needed crafting if he were to continue getting satisfaction from the material. He would have to re-write it, at least in his head. He sharpened his mental pencil.
What did the girls look like? He made Kate a blonde with short hair, like an old girlfriend whose name he couldn’t remember. He made Annie dark with long hair. She was based on a fashion picture from
And Annie, as a brunette, should have small tits with small dark nipples. It seemed right. Didn’t it? He designed her narrow hips with pronounced jutting bones. He could hold on to them. The pubic hair posed a problem. The familiar dark bush, or something more interesting? What about long straight strands? He could comb and part the hair. It could be something of a game, if not a ritual. Then, while he was doing that she could be painting her toenails. It would make a nice complexity of angled limbs, her hands and his hands, all reaching forward. Greg was no more a painter than a writer. But his erotic impulses moved him in the direction of art.
Kate came out quite lush-looking. Five or seven pounds overweight. So pale was her skin he could see the tracery of veins in her heavy breasts. Her pubic hair would be curly blonde, glistening, so her slit was quite clearly visible. A great contrast with Annie. Now he had the basis of conflict within himself. He might have to choose
