She lowers herself carefully onto the hospital trolley, already her flesh feels precious. Mischa, walking beside her, slips a small Russian doll into her hand. She opens it up, inside is a tiny pearl.
“This will be you.”
“It might not work.” She can’t keep the anxiety out of her voice.
“Maybe not now, but I know it will eventually. I love you.”
Smiling, he disappears for a second as they enter the clinic through separate doors. As the attendants slip her onto the bed, Mischa reappears in a green hospital gown and picks up a stethoscope lying on the small operating table beside the bed. He puts the earpieces into her ears and places the end over his heart.
“You see? My heart runs with yours…”
She laughs, the accidental poetry of his grammar still making her melt.
“Hearts don’t run, they race.”
“Race? We are lovers not athletes.”
“Mischa, I’m scared.”
He kisses her.
“Don’t be.”
The nurse starts to pull the screens around and Deidre reaches for Mischa’s hand. Her heart is, indeed, running. She gazes up at the ceiling with its fluorescent light, blinking slightly.
Mischa squeezes her hand. “You OK?” he whispers.
She smiles up at him. Any minute now the surgeon will inject the fertilized eggs into her womb.
“I’m trying to visualize what she’ll look like.”
“It could be a boy.”
“It could.”
Mischa leans down and kisses her. Suddenly she wants to cry.
THE LISTENING ROOM
I have always found the concept of hell vaguely exciting, a sort of pornographic Bosch scenario, devils with weasel heads and huge phalluses impaling pale golden maidens, buttocks parted, hands bound ruthlessly behind…
Looking up from her book, she crosses her legs. She feels herself becoming moist. Outside the bus, the lights of the city sail past. It’s a summer night, the kind of heat that excites, making everything seem possible.
She is still young. She sits there, book in lap, feeling the perimeters of her body under the tight satin dress, the underwire of her bra pushing up her breasts. Sweat runs between the tight material and her waist. She shifts her weight, peeling one buttock from the plastic seat. Everything vibrating under her skin. She looks back down at the book, a deconstruction of sexuality, a birthday present from him.
As I play back the images I become both the taken and the taker.
PORN TALK: HER
He pushes me against the door, his hard cock pressing against me through his trousers. He pulls up my skirt, thrusting his hand down my underpants and finding the tip of my clit. Gently, he teases it until it is big enough to pull at between his fingers. I fall moaning against the wall.
PORN TALK: HIM
She runs her tongue along the underside of my cock. I push back her lips with my fingers; her mouth is soft, sucking. She takes me into her, sucking deeply, her tongue a ring of fire. I’m gonna explode, her hot wet pussy lies spread on the pillow. I find her clit. As I suck, it grows like a little cock. She thrashes about, losing control as I ram deeper and deeper into her throat.
As she reads she is being watched. She glances up; two men are sitting opposite her. Their eyes have hope. The briefcase at her feet falls to the floor as the bus lurches around the corner. Quickly she rights it. If only they knew, the people on the bus, if only they knew what was inside.
There is a schism in me, between the erotic and the intimate. One, by definition, negates the other. For me the pursuit of sensuality for its own sake without the confines of emotional expectation or history is a freeing of the libido, standing outside of marriage, conception, emotional obligation. The subject becomes object. Object is