Sex Noir
Stories of Sex, Death, and Loss
by
Jamie Joy Gatto
Circlet Press, Inc.
Cambridge, MA
Welcome to the Circlet Press ebook edition of: Sex Noir by Jamie Joy Gatto
Copyright © 2002 by Circlet Press, Inc.
Cover photograph © 2002 by Matt Towler
Copyright information continued at end.
Author Photograph by oceania@venetiandreams.com
All Rights Reserved
Print Edition ISBN 1-885865-41-4
Ebook ISBN 978-1-885865-68-7
First Print Edition October 2002
First Electronic Edition July 2009
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Contents
Foreword
Litany for the Muse of Tragedy
Hungry
Dahlia
Liquid Kitten
Verbosity
Mastering The Storm
Waiting for Claudette
My Mistress Is Dead
Gilding Lily
Water Fall
The Perfect Piece
I Still Dream
To Run With Anguish
Quarter Past Four
Come Monday
Extenuating Circumstances
Moon Thirteen Degrees Aquarius
Go Your Own Way
Acknowledgments
Credits
For Alex
“Welcome this pain,
for one day it will be useful to you.”
-Ovid
May our fierce love carry us to rise up gently through our pain. May our fight be not against one another, but to conquer the fear and loss we both have shared. May we find in one another everything we've lost and everything we still have good that remains. Thank you for respecting and believing in me.
I will always believe in you.
Foreword
My obsession with sex and death began as a child, when I was six years old and in the second grade, after viewing Franco Zefferelli's Romeo & Juliet. I have never let it go. As an adult, I discovered that there is no ache, no intensity, quite so exquisite as the pain associated with longing: the yearning for that which has been lost, for those whom we lust after, and for those people, feelings and situations which we feel we can never again recover, be they imagined or real, metaphorical or allegorical. It's all in the wanting, the waiting, the craving, the purging. Sounds a bit like sexual desire, doesn't it? The term erotic tragedy is not an oxymoron, it's a fact of life, a part of our human condition.
Unlike most erotica collections, my goal is not simply to elicit feelings of passion, arousal and sexual thrill, but to dig deeper to the core of the human sexual experience, to find a place where sex is more than just physical lust, but a means of survival, communication and connection. My mission is to create a psychosexual montage of fictional stories and characters which represent our collective consciousness of the dark sexual experience. If you happen to get turned on along the way, so be it.
While writing Sex Noir I explored and exploited this association of sex, death and loss by diving head first into a series of miseries only to come up for air after each specific tale was told. I never forgot my mission; the characters and the stories themselves never let me once stray. You'll find the emotional intensity broad: from the fleeting twinges of self-doubt, to the pathology of violent obsession, suicide, and emotional greed. The sexual explicitness ranges from hardcore pornographic to a light and splendid grazing of sensuality.
Even though I entwined the theme tightly, it felt fresh for me to bring forward each story. No two stories are quite alike. You'll meet a variety of characters with a gamut of sexual desires: everything from plain vanilla sex to lifestyle SMers, from virgins to vixens. There are both male and female protagonists who may be heterosexual, bisexual or homosexual. And while each character has a different story to tell, each share something in common: lust for the flesh, the need for connection, and the pain of deprivation. Many of the stories are categorically tragedies; others barely touch on the pathos bubbling just below the surface of any unhealthy relationship, or lingering in the disturbed mind. Some offer hope, others offer none.
It is my wish, that the sanctification I experienced through the crafting and subsequent purging of these tales from my psyche to yours becomes a form of transubstantiation. Maybe some of you will get hot, sexually turned on, and experience the diametrically opposed sensations of pleasure mixed with pain, sex combined with emotional ache. I do hope some of you will dare to shed a tear, utter a small sigh, a tremor, maybe shudder in sympathetic-or more likely, empathetic-understanding. Perhaps you'll shudder from orgasm. Either way, it's baptism by fire. Dive in. But, please take heed, there may not be anyone there to catch you, to comfort you, to hold you, or to take your hand.
Jamie Joy Gatto
New Orleans, LA
October 2002
Litany for The Muse of Tragedy
She walks in wondrous fields of calla lilies singing,
Mourning the Death of yet another Love.
When love fails sadly, no Siren's song is sweeter;
The Muse is in her glory.
Melpomene is in ecstasy.
And with her dagger she carves the mark
Upon wicked hearts of men whose lies fall
Upon ears of faithful lovers,
Lovers lying only to themselves.
To protect the lies, the pleaselings do not see
The trace of blood that spills
So clearly from breast pockets,
Flowing from those ancient, Wicked hearts.
Sex, lies, mendacity.
Melpomene is in ecstasy.
And when in death a love is lost for all eternity,
Tears fall furious until they pool,
Lingering in the nether-place,
Tamped down by lips and eyes pressed closed.
No one cares to feel the sorrow growing in the gut,
Festering in the heart for longer than one lifetime.
Melpomene is in ecstasy.
And just as Sartre fell disloyal to Simone,
Proof from feathered pen upon the parchment
to another, younger love,
As Romeo and Juliet fell dead unto the temptress Fate,
And Madame Bovary died in the cold, alone,
Melpomene, too found ecstasy.
Dionysus left her hungry cunt and aching heart to suffer alone
With dawn fast breaking through ripening orchards.
She tore fistfuls of fruit, enraged, enraptured,
Beat her chest raw in abandoned glee,
Sobbed as sticky nectar clung to bare breasts.
Oh, to fall in love with a man more endeared to his drink
than to his Muse.
Melpomene? Do you weep?
Melpomene is in ecstasy. Amen.
Hungry
I eat a plum, I think of him. The black, blue-frosted fruit feels full in my hands, cool. The ridge dividing it speaks to me of the delicate split between his heavy, shaved balls. I can feel that ridge, remember the lines with my tongue, find the place in my mind where the tactile sensations of his sex are etched within me. I did not remember it so exactly until now, holding this cold plum in my palm, rolling it warm.
I miss him. His scent and the way his whispers so near my lips are filled with the perfume of his mouth. And how the curl of his lips is so silly it always makes me smile. And how whatever he says won't matter if I'm looking at that curve, because once I catch that part of his smile, my mind locks onto it and a little of me dies. I die happy. I go to heaven. I wake up, and he is still talking to me. I smile. He's still here. For now.
I scrape the dark, shiny surface of the fruit with my teeth and puncture the taut walls with my incisors. The yellow pulp, juicy and tart, fills my mouth with wetness and cold, syrupy liquid. I feel his come fill my mouth, bitter and in hot, little spurts. I hear him moan. I hear his sort of sob. He always sounds as if he is crying when he comes. And I cry thinking of it. One happy little tear rolls down my face and joins in with the juice which seeps at the corner of my mouth, the taste of salt lost to the oh-so-sweet. The taste of him so much greater than the taste of me.
When I'm with him, it's never enough. If I come I want to come again. If I see him, I want to see him again. When I'm near him, I want to be nearer. I want to be inside him when he is inside me. I want to have a cock so I can fill his holes with my appendage, fill him up with a part of me. Make him want me like I want him. Make him long for me.
When he suckles my breast, I want to feed him mother's milk, to nourish his soul, to make him be my baby, to keep him near me. Where is he tonight? Where is this man? This everyman whom I miss every minute I do not have him near me. Just one man. One man of many. I love him. I think I love him. I think I love him more than the last one. More than the last one I needed so much.
I hate him. I am still hungry after I finish the fruit. I gnaw at the seed; the last of the pulp sticks greedily to it, not quite ready to feed me, but ready to feed the earth, to make more plum trees. It's never enough for me. Just one plum. One plum of many. One is never enough for me. As soon as it's begun, it is finished.
I eat a plum and think of him.
Dahlia
The paintings began arriving one by one: great canvases covered with stiff, brown craft paper secured tight with packing tape, filling my living room, grand foyer, hallway. Before I had known her, before she had even walked across the threshold, they appeared in the arms of her students ringing my bell, delivery vans, sent by air freight. The last one came to rest at my front door, the paper cracked like the frail shell of an egg, an arm-a woman's arm-exposed in glistening oil. I had only seen her once, and I believed the arm belonged to her.
I knew she was an artist, had never seen her work, only knew of it from rumors at cocktail parties, fragments of conversations caught at gallery openings. The fact was that I needed a roommate, my grad school money would not be in until fall, and there was an endless summer ahead. An artist seemed an intriguing match, and I was assured that money would be of no consequence, the monthly bills split neatly in half by a quiet type, a loner, the perfect roomie. Yes, she would take the sunny room left by my oldest friend gone to find his fortune in a bigger, richer city. No, she didn't mind the cat. Yes, she'd be in town in a week. She did not warn me about the paintings.
I wanted to keep the apartment that Derek and I had worked so hard to restore, but it was more than that-I wanted to keep him with me somehow. The house was stately in a way that only an antique New Orleans home could be. We had hand painted each plaster wall a translucent, watercolor yellow trimmed in the lacquered shine of hot white, colors we chose in order to capture the freshness of natural light. The ceilings stretched fifteen feet above glorious, working french windows, row after row framing live oak tendrils that swayed in the second story panes. Each frame was sanded and pried open by Derek's hands, made to work again after years and layers of careless paint sealing them shut. He had freed them to let the breezes of humid winters cool us in our breakfast nook, making it our special place for mornings of café au lait, ruminations of men we had escorted to the door at dawn, or the men that sometimes still showered in our home.
It was there that we giggled, yawned hung-over or bitched about their sloppy kisses, limp penises. The place where we shared our sexual secrets, modestly averted our eyes when men showed up in the doorframe only wearing a towel or less, then rated their asses as they walked away for our later conversations. It was at that enameled 1930s table that Derek described to me how to give the flawless blow job, and it was later there that I disclosed in detail just exactly what I'd done to improve his perfect technique.
The languorous weekend before Dahlia's arrival, I spent with Derek and his favorite lover, Rand. All of us nestled under quilts on the floor of the half-bare parlor, sharing buttered popcorn in a massive, earthen bowl, tossing morsels to Miggins, my ever-starving cat. Nostalgic stories coalesced laughter with the briny, bleachy taste of tears dripping at the back of my throat. I promised him I would not cry. I promised him I would write. He promised me he'd keep up with his meds, watch his smoking. I swore I'd still marry him if we were both single at forty. Miggins would be our maid of honor. We'd get a bi, Latino houseboy, share him as a lover and we'd never do dishes again.
Late Sunday night, or rather, early Monday morning, just hours before Derek's departure, I surrendered to the jittery tiredness that comes with brokenheartedness, the kind that won't let you sleep, won't let you stay awake. Scooping up Miggins, and blowing kisses to my sleeping boys on the floor, I scuffled to my front bedroom and stretched out on top the covers. I could not fully commit to getting into bed. When I woke up, he'd be gone. I was not a morning person; that was the deal, and dawn was slowly filing in.