for yourself more, though, not exactly like the slogan of “be a man,” but I think a woman wants to be sheltered sometimes. It’s a mean world out there. Still, I don’t always understand you. There is the language problem, and then there are all those national pride things that you carry around with you, as if holding on for dear life. But I guess you have to do that when living in a strange country.”
“Often, I perceive you as being not really here, but off somewhere in a foreign land, ha ha. It’s as if you are here one minute and then in Berkeley or swimming in the Pacific Ocean the next. I want to confess that I’ve been feeling closer to you lately. Are we really in a romance stage? And what does that mean? Like, I don’t want to analyze it too much. We both have our own separate lives, and we like those parts, also that keeps us independent and still in touch with our own particular interests. You have your tennis, your reading, artwork, writing, music, and the walks in nature, which we both share. And I have my aerobic class, my interest in the arts, like you do, my friends, and of course, my violin.”
“Oh by the way, we’re having fresh strawberries with Schlag for our Nachspiese/dessert. I know you like fresh fruit. Well, are we feeling the wine, or are we just melting into each other’s arms? It doesn’t look like we will see that new film, what was the title of it?” I say, drifting back to those naked breasts this afternoon and now lusting for this luscious body right here in front of me. I am picturing our moving over to the sofa and grabbing for each other in mad, passionate love.
I go to the stereo and put on that violin concerto by Beethoven, I forget which one, but I know Anna will like it. Candlelight, wine, woman, and now music: the basic ingredients for a cozy night at home.
Anna moves to get up and clear the table. I interrupt her and tell her that I will take care of it, that she has the night off, and that we should adjourn to the other room where we’ll be much more comfortable. I make this ever so subtle hint, looking for that warm, receptive, come-on-over-to-my-place-baby gleam in her eye. I take her hand and kiss it with a manly bow, of the sort the Habsburgs used to make, I guess.
“‘Will you be so kind as to accompany me to the next chamber for some after-dinner aperitif, perhaps, or some surprise entertainment?” I inquire, remembering that awhile ago I was promised some kind of surprise for the thirty push ups, only to come up two short, but still looking for some goodies. Besides, I deserve it, I decide, and I am feeling no pain. Neither is she, judging by my dinner mate’s response. My only concern is that Anna may be feeling the wine so much that she is a bit too tired.
As we arrive at our next destination, she immediately sits down on the sofa and sighs as if she were about to crash, but not really. She is totally agreeable. It’s about nine or so and I follow quickly onto the sofa, as if stalking some wild animal. My instincts are wide open, and I am on the track, hot and inebriated.
I immediately sit next to her or almost right on top of her, and start grabbing at her full breasts and kneading them through the soft cotton material. They are most pliable, yet firm, and I feel a stirring in my loins. It’s getting hot, and we gravitate like two magnets-lips seeking each other. This feels good, feels as though another voice inside takes over as the body starts to relax and grope and moan and groan. Anna is French kissing me now, darting her tongue in and out of my mouth, and begins to ream the circumference of my mouth. This is highly erotic, and I feel like I am taking off.
Further along, she starts to caress my prick, now large and erect, through my pants. She goes up and down the length of it and starts to rub her one thigh over my leg as if to get close to genital-to-genital contact. I hear our breathing as we are both obviously in another space and time. She places my hand on her cunt, under her dress, and I feel her thin little panties. She begins to squirm, and she is getting wet. We can’t stop now. I have managed to get under her dress and her lace bra and am finding myself moving towards a now-naked breast, with the dark-pinkish nipple now hard and erect.
At about the same time, I hear something down below: my pants are being opened. My cock is being liberated. There is a tongue darting up and down, sucking and licking as if it were a chocolate ice cream cone. Anna really knows how to give head, but she is seldom this forward and fast.
I have my finger in her cunt, and take them out to smell her wonderful fragrance. Her juices are flowing. Now I am rolling my eyes, as if I am about to come in her mouth. I am hard as a brick and red hot and about to shoot off into outer space. She suddenly stops and sits on me, and we have beautiful intercourse, with simultaneous orgasms.
The next morning I hear sounds, some singing. It’s like some diva singing operetta over the radio or on a CD, but it sounds so close, and I wonder if it’s originating nearby, and live, even. I am not surprised, though. This is Vienna, after all, the city of music.
I hear a few hands clapping and I also clap, being a guest participant-listener in this real-life fantasy next door, over at that Schoenbrunn yellow villa. Is this a movie I am in, or is this a singer really practicing next door in that large villa? I am privy to some operetta, and the voice trills and thrills.
17.
MEANWHILE AND
CHICO MARX
This is not Berkeley, Wavy Gravy, and the Ashkenazi choir rehearsal in People’s Park. This is not Telegraph Avenue and the freaks and geeks and intelligentsia, business people, poets and hangers-on, street people, a few homeless, and students eating and kibbitzing at the Med. This is not Moe’s bookstore, and CD row where the hodgepodge of color and acting-out low riders, students, and assorted minorities come to have fun, play drums, bask in the sun: alive, smiling and smoking and toking and groping for another beer. How queer the rhyming becomes when the operetta is so near.
This Mickey Mouse Club special, and this Hullabaloo, this Dick Clark with the radio blaring Englishese over German-speaking peoples’ networks, this roguish show of powder puffs rattling in my brain, continues and continues. I recall the “Politics of Meaning” articles in that Jewish intellectual magazine, and the new wave of “isms” and ideologies attempting to co-opt word-speak and straighten out the “people’s united” slogans, the downtrodden and dispossessed, the politicians sleeping with the secretaries, and the chosen people proclaiming that the messianic era has come and gone and we are all still waiting.
Numbed-out, is what I think. Who is really alive, and where are they smoking and drinking and fucking and singing, and dancing in the streets? The youth are wearing new uniforms now, and the police are doing their beat to the beat. Steal This Book, Steal Your Face, we once read and heard. It was Abbie Hoffman’s book, or the Grateful Dead’s album title. The four aces are showing, the trigger-happy ones are buying and selling armaments over the counter.
Alongside the opera singers, the mental masturbators are on parade. What is it I was going to do today, besides lull away this non-working day in a sea of madness? The brain, that’s the fault. Whatever man can conceive, he, or she, can do or make. Let’s bake this planet alive. Let’s educate the little brats into thinking that their autonomous track, the life expectancy, what life owes us, is met crawling over the backs of others on this here Mother Earth.
It’s a stonewaller’s paradise, status quo and all the rest. The actors are role-playing their parts, showing us who we are. The reality and the fantasy: Which is it, man? Get up and make yourself a strong one, a coffee with milk and sugar. Let that caffeine do its thing on the morning after. Let’s see, there’s the opera, on that channel. Oh, blah dee, oh blah da, or something like that. It really is so simple, isn’t it? The maya, the mirage, the transparent self, that mask in the face as the sculptor is recreating stillness-in-motion, the images on the screen, the sounds of the voices and the images played at us incessantly in this information age.
Outside the windows, the leaves blow, moving in a shivering chorus of greens, of lights, darks, and in-between.
This toast is good. I think I’ll have some marmalade with the bread. This is a lot different from back home, with the eggs easy-up and the bacon and toast and hash-browns and orange juice, and the coffee with a croissant on the side, ready-made and spilling over into the intestinal tract.