Another Sex and Death Story (part 2)

How Part 1 ended:

The next morning Barbara-Lee was up early to beat the traffic, and I, off to Santa Monica for work.

“I like your apartment, Billy Wizeman.”

“It likes you.”

“I’ll be back.”

“I hope so.”

She gave me a tepid kiss on the cheek, just to let me know that we were no longer in sex mode, and there was no need for romance, passion or any of its cousins.

As soon as I closed the door the phone rang. It was my ex-wife. “Your brother just went to hospice. They don’t think he’s going to make it through the night.”

Part 2

In my mind he was still a golden, athletic king: All-Nassau County in football as a sophomore. Only 5’10”, he could dunk a tennis ball from a standing jump. Bow-legged and broad shouldered, he roamed the center field of my childhood, tracking down fly balls like he had radar in his glove. To have watched him traverse his life as a grand and graceful being, and to see him now, still several years short of seventy, laying there withered and atrophied, eaten away from the inside and that so strikingly visible on the outside, well, it was “a lot” as my son (who was along with me) likes to say; and on top of all that I was supposed to fly to Paris in a few days to work on the film I was writing. My brother, a movie producer for the last thirty years, had worked out many scheduling conflicts. I wondered how we might handle this one.

*

I am not going to relay the gory details, except to say there was no reprieve from the governor. Just love and tragedy. We wept, sat shiva (our version of), were stunned, and still are.

*

I landed at Charles de Gaulle about 8:30 in the morning. It was dark, and when the light finally did come the sky turned a World War Two shade of gray I had never seen before. The feeling was eerie and existential, but I was just happy to fly away from my grief, and Air France first class at that. The hotel was a small, lacquered affair, a few stragglers still having breakfast in the lobby when I arrived. I sat at the bar, had a café au lait and played the traveling scribe, his talents so urgently needed they whisk him away in the wake of death, so he can work his magic in the city of light. Then I went up to my room and put in a call to Barbara-Lee.

Turned out she was flat on her back with influenza, which had her a bit stir crazy and especially receptive to the sordid musings of a grieving Wizeman. We talked a lot over the next days, and she sent several pictures of the graphic, close-up variety; her flu adding a fevered desperation, as if she were burning up both inside and out. Floating aimlessly in viral boredom, the pictures became her pet project, which inspired me to start my own; a series of missives I sent each day called the “French Postcard Series.”

I’m sitting in a strange conference room on the 5^th floor of an old garage/building on a quirky street named Rue de Caviliere, which feels like a dead end but instead bends like a cobblestone elbow. I just had a savagely Gallic lunch; a classic jambon et beurre, that was 90% bread and left me whistling the Marseillaise. I am un-slept, unkempt, and running on grief and fumes.

That was a riff from postcard #1.

Open your hand and I’ll pour the words in like colored sugar. Then lick your palm, so your tongue gets stained with whoever I am right now.

That was the start of #2.

Paris was a big, beautiful blur. Jet-lagged into Jew-paste, I was spiraling on death and time change and how good the pears in the supermarket were. Unable to sleep I rambled down the late-night Parisian streets, taking ragged notes and snapping pictures.

I wander through the city, throwing coins in the river and kissing statues in the park. Café life is sweet, and in the soft, gray rain it is one’s scared duty to smoke and drink and laugh with hookers named Sabine. Last night I was sitting in an old bistro on the Boulevard Du Montparnasse and it occurred to me that the truth about bad boys is that deep down they want to be good. The only problem is they’ve gotten too good at being bad. But I’m not a bad boy, I’m a dime store French philosopher, smoking Gauloises and making it up as I go along. Not to bury the lede, but it looks like the producers have gotten what they need from me for the moment and I’ll be back Saturday. Maybe you’ll be feeling well enough to drive up on Sunday and I can rest and heal in the goodness that is Barbara-Lee.

That was how #5 ended.

*

She was there at 9:00 AM on Sunday morning, a large duffel across her shoulder and a bag of vegan groceries in each hand. I figured she’d play it cool and blow through sometime after lunch, but instead she’d jumped in her SUV at the crack of dawn and headed west toward her man. And why not? We had spent the last days sharing fevered pictures, French postcards, and sweet and salty phone-calls. Our connection hadn’t been weakened by death and transatlantic travel, it had been doubled downed on, and now here she was within twelve hours of my return, standing at my front door with a week’s worth of provisions.

I took the bags from her, placed them down, and readied myself for an embrace worthy of our fortnight apart, but all I got was a brief hug and modest peck on the cheek. She had no interest in gooey reunions, and instead assumed the role of healer on a mission, removing from her bag a small apothecary’s worth of balms, rubs and elixirs. She unscrewed a silver shoe polish tin, fingered the waxy contents and dabbed a rosemary-scented potion on my wrists and temples. “That’s first,” she said, like a woman with a plan. Then right to the kitchen, a pot of steel cut oats quickly started on the stove. “Warm cereal is always good for grief.”

I was waiting for her to settle and come lay one on me, some physical manifestation of being glad to see me, but she was using care taking as a way to keep her distance, and whenever I moved close, I could feel her body language say, “No, not yet.” Out came two bunches of fresh mint from a bag that were soon steeping as tea. “You have a lot of healing to do Billy Wizeman.” She wasn’t wrong about that, and after a full-regimen of essential oils and new-age desert care, we finally made our way into the bedroom to see what was doing in there.

*

It was no secret that I was looking forward to her slapping it around again, and there had been much discussion on the topic. Also in play was the idea that she was converting me from a “dom” to a “switch”, which had a put a victorious twinkle in her eye. I tried to grab a little of the ground I’d lost back, saying I didn’t completely buy into that narrative, seeing myself more as a bossy poet than a true dominant, but it was too late. I was on my way to becoming her bitch, even if it was just a part-time role. But more than any of that I was just looking to connect. I had traveled many miles inside and out and needed something that mattered. I was hoping that something was Barbara-Lee.

We lay on the bed and I reached for her hand, and though she gave it to me, there was something reserved and distant about her. The first time she came over she was loose and free, lounging around like a happy cat, but this time she couldn’t seem to get comfortable, and the magic words needed to make her so were eluding me.

It was no one’s fault. We were simply being forced to face the fact that we were basically strangers, and that the heightened intimacy that had been so easy to manifest from six thousand miles away was a whole lot harder to create from six inches. Such is the diabolical nature of these phones, which provide boundless opportunity for projection. An unearned intimacy, free of touch, smell and feel.

A bit later, things finally did turn physical but there was no softness. I tried to kiss her but she resisted and instead remained in her shaman/nurse role, launching into a clinical discourse on the healing powers of kink. As she talked, she went to her duffel, but instead of taking out the next homeopathic remedy she pulled out a strap-on dildo.

“Have you ever been pegged?”

“No.”

“Would you like to be?”

“I don’t know. I might have to lose a couple of more siblings before I’m ready for that.”

She chuckled, and informed me that a lot of grief was held in the sphincter and that a good pegging might really help. It sounded reasonable, but I wasn’t ready to go there just yet, so she put the girl cock away and pulled something else out. A zip-lock bag filled with clothespins.

“You want to put those on my nipples?”

“Your balls.”

“You want to put clothes pins on my balls?”

“Are you okay with that?”

“I don’t know… Let’s see.”

Now, I don’t know if I just am a little naturally deadened around the sack or whether long-term intravenous drug use is the culprit, but for some reason the clothes pins weren’t that painful. At one point she had four stretching my scrotum out like a flying squirrel, and even that barely got my attention. She was mystified and a bit disappointed. “I’ve never seen that before,” she said, as if my sexual equipment was a science experiment gone wrong. “Have you always been like this?” I didn’t know what to say, no one had ever treated my nuts like laundry before. But I was definitely not enjoying the experience like I had the last time. Last time she’d caught me off guard, rousing me from sleep like a succubus with a good right hook, but this time I knew what was coming, and in the bright light of day I felt like a fly, and Barbara-Lee, a twisted ten-year old boy trying to pick my wings off.

But it wasn’t just the sex. The whole day had been wonky. Too much had been reached for too soon-- we had built ourselves a fast-moving train out of words and longing, but when we tried to jump on it, the train wasn’t there. It was the moment when two wise, sensitive people check in with each other, tell the truth about what they’re experiencing and see if they can find some sort of authentic human connection. But instead, I just flipped the script and tried to dom us out of it.

At first it was effective, the physical truth of my size and force enough to get us out of our heads, but a few moments later we were lost, and I found myself experiencing the awful loneliness that only sex gone wrong can deliver. I didn’t know what to do, so, I ratcheted up my intensity, and with her now on the floor by the bed, tried to recreate the happy face-fucking I had given her the last time she was here. She resisted, and so I pushed harder thinking maybe she wanted me to just overtake her and relieve her of all responsibility. Of course, I was wrong, and the next thing I knew Barbara-Lee was on her knees, balled up, arms covering her head as if debris were falling from the ceiling. She began calling “Red! Red! Red!” Not well-versed in BDSM protocol, it took me a few seconds to realize that “Red” was Barbara-Lee’s “safe” word. Of course, I backed off immediately, but it was too late. She sure didn’t seem “glad I was a pervert” now.

Eventually, she calmed down, and later, even prepared a shockingly un-delicious dinner of gluten-free pasta with jack-fruit Bolognese. She was supposed to stay ‘til Tuesday, but early the next morning she told me that she had forgotten about her dog’s vet appointment, and needed to go back to the desert. I knew right then that I would never see Barbara-Lee again.

She packed her bags and gathered her supplies, and as she did this she began to disappear, like when dead people come to earth for a brief time in movies, then grow fainter and fainter as they return to the other side.

I went to my window and watched her head down the path toward my front gate, a stylish and attractive older woman, walking away from a very brief love affair gone wrong. That was the Frenchest postcard of all.