by Jeremy Edwards
(11/04/09)
Before, I believe, Claude spoke to me -- certainly before he issued me a map -- the arresting, bottomless fecundity of his eyebrows, thick and dark, dampened my own thick-and-dark-furred place.
But later that day, I invited myself to sit opposite him in the museum cafeteria, and he was effusive with behind-the-scenes lore and gossip. And I forgot that he'd made me damp, that I'd drifted into the first gallery with an ache and an ember in my groin. Suddenly he was a raconteur, and that made him seem fatherly, though he was twenty-eight to my thirty-one.
So I thought I'd made a friend, that is, a friend only, a friend for five o'clock coffee; but his taut fingertips on an espresso cup, a week later, reminded me that my flesh had hungered for him before my social appetite. I deliberately plumped my pussy moist in the ladies' room, then loaned him my pen so that he could write down his phone number -- hoping the rude streak of cunt deposited on the barrel by my fingers would breathe to him.
I asked Claude to promise me one thing: that whenever I brought him to my apartment, we'd fuck before talking. He said he had no reservations about such a promise, except that it could not be his sole promise to me.
"I never promise a person one thing only, because the pressure of keeping a one-and-only promise, however appealing a promise it is, becomes too great. Let me, instead, promise you two things. And it doesn't matter what the second thing is."
I asked him to promise he'd never again make a speech like that, unless we'd been drinking.
I started coming to the museum with no knickers on. Initially, this was in service of my moments with Claude. Sometimes, if we couldn't manage a locked office or lavatory to fuck in during his morning break, Claude would simply grasp my arse cheeks under my skirt for a few minutes, in the back of a little-used coat room. His casual hands on my bareness made my skin itch and tickle all over.
There was a folding chair in there, and Claude would unfold it, with an official snap, so that I could sit on his thighs, intentionally making a wet mark on the ridge where his cock buttressed his trousers. It would stain, but he usually worked behind a counter; and, with the tourist season behind us, few people had eyes on Claude's crotch.
I soon discovered the thrill of being one layer closer to nakedness among the artworks. I felt I could see the colors and definition better, as if the panties had acted like a semi-opaque blindfold all those years. When alone in one of the galleries, I sometimes showed my gratitude for my newfound clarity of vision by flashing the paintings from a bench -- imagining a bulge developing in each canvas, and amusing myself with the notion that I could make long-dry paint wet again.
I was the wild animal in Claude's museum, a juicy slice of natural history among all the beaux arts.
And yet, though I loved the titillating dazzle of exquisite objects, I didn't want glamour with my orgasms. In the empty, utilitarian corridors of the museum's basement, my urges flourished. Waiting there for Claude at lunchtime, I often masturbated myself into a panting mess, a nexus of organic sentience thriving on the gray porridge of unadorned simplicity.
Claude was pretty as a picture -- soft eyes beneath those dense brows, eloquent lips above a crude chin -- and his beauty never failed to attract me. But once in the clutch of my libido, he invariably became the opposite of art. Here, his carnality was an indeterminate shape with no edges and no grain, a benign soup with an erection. Here, his attractiveness was elemental; monochromatic; uniformly carpeted.
In the corner gallery upstairs was a portrait, a businesswoman from 1909 whose ordinariness inspired me. Her Edwardian skirt, jacket, and hat were all black -- not mournful, but mundane, like moist, rich soil. Her burning-eyed integrity reminded me that sex was the birthright of every creature complex enough to have genitals, and that one didn't need to put on a particular type of underwear -- or, indeed, any -- to claim it. At times I borrowed her vise grip on identity, just long enough to come like a thunderstorm on Claude's reassuringly bland, sturdy cock.
Riding Claude's dick, biting his eyebrows, I could imagine that the woman from 1909 had such a sense of self that she had forgotten her own name -- that it had become an unnecessary appendage. And as I pounded my cunt walls against Claude's flesh, I could go one step further and forget that anyone was anybody. So much for identity: yes, even my precious paradigms could melt into swirling contradictions, when I was devouring and being devoured. At those moments, Claude and I were like primal mud -- and mud had no capacity for logic, nor for aesthetic appreciation. The fine art of a thousand museums would have to wait for me to recoalesce into something with eyes...something that could once again discuss curatorial trivia over espresso, and show its snatch to paintings.
