Playing
Tennis With Kafka
EDITOR'S NOTE: “Playing Tennis
with Kafka” surfaced under the title “In the Penis
Colony,” in Is There Sex Over Forty? by William Levy
(Amsterdam: Transactions of the Invisible Language Society,
no. 3, 1991)
"At
the moment of orgasm... All at once we have merged with the food
chain and for a split second we realize that there is no difference
between the eater
and the eaten."
- Kirby Olson, The Food Chain: The Ideal Pet
From the very beginning Chantal and I were destined to be an
erotic combination. Our lives were to be entwined. Artists and intellectuals,
together we were like
charged electricity.
When we first knew each other, this intense, small but powerfully built, auburn-haired
pocket amazon was a dancer. Now she had become France's top modern dance photographer,
her unique books, exhibitions and posters dominate the field. She was a fiercely
independent, strong-willed woman who never compromised and always took chances.
Chantal took great pride in her still tightly muscled anatomy. She liked to take
off her clothes, lie invitingly spread-eagle on the bed. Head forward, arms and
legs outstretched she showed off her small, but nevertheless voluptuously proportioned
rear view, a graceful neck, strong back and firm ass buttressing well-tapered
legs and arched feet. As it is written, "How beautiful are the feet of those
that preach the gospel of peace, and bring glad tidings of good things" (Romans
10.15.). Squatting over her, I'd merge parts with her, then lower myself covering
her torso with my own, fitting together, as we'd both squirm and flail about
like fish out of water. With a heavy, ruminative air she'd murmur a favorite
fancy. "Mmmmnnn. Let's go wandering together in the alleys of Prague someday.
Ahhhaaaaaa."
The
other week (or weeks/months ago) I was mixing some sounds preparing
for my weekly rock 'n' roll radio program. The phone rang.
And rang. Finally, I pressed all the buttons stopping the equipment,
lowered the headphones to around my neck and picked up the
receiver. It was Chantal.
"Why haven't you answered my notes?" I asked.
"The
answer is cancer!" she replied with resignation.
In the less than a year since we saw each other last, she had had two unsuccessful
operations, followed by radiation therapy. Then her whole body was taken apart
and put together again in a complete bone-marrow transplant. She was only in
her late forties and it sounded like the final countdown. Very confused, of
course, asking -- why me? And afraid, yet happy to discover she was surrounded
by love from friends and family.
Obituaries seem to have become the growth literary genre of the nineties. Death
watches the new spectator sport. People dropping off, passing on, all over
the place. Not all of them gracefully. Like a former patron of mine from the
London daze. This soul-sick multimillionaire (a minor item of his holdings
included two Shakespeare first folios) had died recently all alone in a low
bed-and-breakfast south of the Thames, aged circa forty-four.
"I don't think I'll live to benefit from reduced fare travel on trains," I
heard Chantal say, "so why don't we rendezvous in Prague this summer."
It was a courage you can't refuse. When people are sick their friends gather
around the bed. Yet nobody bothers to get into the bed with them.
Since Wilhelm Reich there is an enormous amount of sex information for young
people, some of it very good. And recently in our aging society, there is much
concern about sex and the senior citizen -- mostly about dysfunction, however.
What about those harvest years in between -- let's say from thirty-nine to
fifty-nine? There falls the shadow.
By this time we know technique, about caring and are not troubled by impotency
or fear of heart attacks. The crisp salad days are over. Yes. Nevertheless,
our juices are still flowing, as mountain streams renewed by autumn hurricanes.
Almost everyone has been married at least once, or is living in some form of
open relationship. When we are young, we don't want continued connections out
of mere convenience. Now we want all sexual adventures to be convenient. Consenting
adults to the max.
In the first youthful phase of our sex life we learn to love and not pretend
that we know what love is. In the third part, as seniors, we defend the meaning
of our life and we will be wise. In these middle years, we enter into relationships
as a loving person, knowing we will die. It's not romance we are looking for,
but wonder.
For long trips, I find a coach preferable to the railway. If for no other reasons
than one can see a bit more of the countryside, get out, stretch, and also
eat while not moving.
I got to Prague first, very early in the morning, on an inexpensive
all-night bus from Amsterdam. There was a marked difference with
last year, when I first
visited this city. Advertisements on the subway. The street moneychangers were
no longer honest. Public transport had gone up four hundred per cent and food
almost as much. The cost of items like packaged soup was overprinted with new
prices. Everywhere there were automatic dispensers for western condoms. Commie
condoms, which I had had the occasion to use in the past, were like going in
wearing a wellie, in itself a sufficient cause for getting rid of the ancien
régime.
I met Chantal at the late-afternoon train that had carried her avec couchette from
the Gare de L'Est. After a warm greeting, we took a taxi to a small-furnished
garden flat I had rented in the Liben district, a northern hilly part of the
city overlooking a bend in the river. Russian champagne was waiting cooled
in the fridge.
Although ill and almost fifty, Chantal had a waif-like beauty, large eyes widely
set apart and a thin poutish mouth. She carried herself with the assurance
of a teenager, her Paris polka dot silk blouse clinging to her body moved around
her small breasts. She telegraphed expectancy. There was an amused but uncertain
expression on her face. Her hair, a moody honey color, was different, much
shorter, thicker, flecked now with patches of gray.
"Mais oui, chéri," she said, shrugging her shoulders. As if
answering my silent, curious stares, Chantal paused, finished the glass of bubbly
and shifted around uneasily on her seat. "Yes. The good thing about my disease
is everyone tells me how good my hair looks."
I was suddenly turned on by the thought of what it would be like to have sex
with her when she was completely hairless (above and below), the side effect
from the radiation treatments. We reached out for each other. Touched hands.
Fondled each other on the greenish plastic kitchen bench, stood up and walked
across the flowered-linoleum floor into the bedroom. Like so many Czech rooms
it was decorated in a combination of brown and orange colored curtains and
walls, wainscoted with slats of heavily varnished garish yellow pinewood. It
had two metal-framed single beds. Above each, a framed illustrated press view
of the Tatra Mountains.
We did our best to overcome these less than lyrical surroundings. She dropped
her clothes. Standing in a black bra and panties trimmed in lace and a single
strand red coral necklace, she began undressing me. Her skin was lightly scented
with eau de rose.
"Let's touch first and talk later," Chantal said.
When I was naked she slid to her knees and took me on her tongue. First, dry
chaste kisses on the head, the shaft, then long and wet metronomic licks starting
from under my balls.
When I stirred she got up and pulled me across the room onto the bed. I found
myself carried away by her gift of spirit and could think of nothing but to
get inside her and hold her still. But she began moving, first shimmying out
of her panties, and unhooking her bra. Her hands touched my pectorals, traced
the vault of my thorax, dug into the flesh of my hips, her nails hurting a
little. I felt her fingers on my thigh, her hand slowly molding the long bulge
of muscle. Then grappling my body, both of us planting kisses, caressing with
hands and knees whatever was available in this flurry of flesh. At one point
sucking each other's toes.
Facing each other again, I squeezed Chantal's tiny body so her narrow breasts
buried themselves in my chest and felt her sex envelope and hold mine. As I
entered her, I felt vaguely irritated. She moved harder and harder against
me, scratching my back and crying sharply until I found myself rushing to explosion
without a motion.
I didn't register in that moment what she had done, only that when I had finished
she lay still for the first time; and the confusion was gone from my mind.
The
next morning I realized Chantal had etched deep blood-filled
scratches on my back. I didn't think I could reject her pain
and desire.
Like
all tourists, we wandered through the streets of mystical Prague,
Europe's most spookishly beautiful city. We watched the mechanical
last judgment go through its paces on the famous fifteenth-century
astronomical clock on the fairy-tale Old Town Square and walked
around the corner to the house of Franz Kafka. He who believed
the meaning of life is that it ends.
"No
wonder he was crazy," I said. "Living so close to
that. Skeletons dancing on the clock every hour. Having to
hear it chime all the time as he was growing up."
"Yes. But not everyone who grew up like that became such a great writer." Chantal
pulled a single-page folder out of her bag. It was a Guide to Kafka's Prague. "According
to this map," she said, " we can go to the city swimming pool where
he often went to swim with his father as a young boy. Or visit the court where
he played tennis."
What could
it have been like to play tennis with Kafka? Did he spin his
serve? Did he rush the net? Or rather did he rely on a good
backhand? Did he have tantrums at a line call?
Instead,
we walked hand in hand toward another part of the river in
the direction of Josefov, the Old Jewish Ghetto. We paid our
respects at the Synagogue and Cemetery, the monuments of prodigious
Rabbi Loew. The original story begins in the sixteenth century.
Using a long-lost formula from the Kabbala, this rabbi is said
to have made an artificial man from clay -- the so-called Golem
-- to help ring the bells and do other menial work. Nevertheless,
this being wasn't a full man; it was animated by a sort of
vegetable half-life. A human creature on a sub-human plane.
A humanoid. What life it had, so the story runs, was only derived
from an alphabetic counting and calculation of a combination
of letters. A word drawn on its forehead each day, that drew
down to itself a vortex, what can be called the divine spirit
of the universe, YHWH Elohim Emet meaning God the Lord is Truth.
However, this newly created being erased the letter alef from
the word emet ("truth"); leaving the word met ("dead").
The creation of a Golem was then in some way an affirmation of the productive
and creative power of Man and a warning about positivist hubris. It came to
life only while the ecstasy of its creator lasted. The experience of being
alive for the fleeting moment, but not beyond it. Like the orgasm, a magical
re-enactment of the creation, producing a sublime state of consciousness that
can make each of us a God. It is not a petite mort. Quite the contrary,
it defers the sense of mortality. The science of combination of number and
sex both repeat, on however small a scale, the work of creation. A neo-biogenesis
of protozoa. The myth of fashioning life from nothing.
Chantal scribbled something on a piece of paper and placed it with the other
messages of hope tucked into the carved spirals on the tomb of Rabbi Loew.
I couldn't bring myself to ask her what she had written.
As
we watchfully strolled through the narrow lanes, Chantal took
photographs,
mainly studies of the angular shadows on the wall and also
a kind of documentary of what we began to refer to as the "mythic
banana." Until a couple years ago the banana was unknown
in the East Block. So now, everyone was on a banana binge,
bananas over bananas. Selling them, buying them, eating them
and completely filling up litter bins everywhere with nothing
but piles of banana skins. Very strange, I thought both the
Golem and the banana are produced without seed.
At last, we
reached the river. The bright early summer day had brought with
it a congestion of promenaders. Celebrating the new democracy,
the sides of the Charles Bridge were lined with booths selling
things. Buskers in military uniforms sang anti-Communist songs.
I bought a poster showing Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and Hitler
all in bed together. The caption read: Politicky Gruppensex. Here,
as in other Soviet block countries, the free market has become
an exciting and frightening jungle economy. The Wild, Wild East.
The Far East of the West. The anomaly of the oriental market prevailing
over the anomie of boardroom strategies. This was not another chance,
but the same chance all over again.
Chantal paused at one of the many tables offering hand-made crafts and bought
a pair of red garnet earrings, a locally mined gem and an extremely good bargain.
We stopped and leaned over the wide, squat sandstone balustrade, between the
looming statues. The swans and rowboats floating, and the sound of mouth organs,
drums and guitars.
Assuming
a studious tone, I remarked, "My guidebook says the Moldau
flows into the Elbe and the Elbe into the North Sea and that
this bridge is held
together with a cement mixed with fresh eggs and wine from all the cities of
Bohemia."
Chantal licked
her upper lip and looked down at the placid water. Then she turned and looked
at me.
Our eyes locked for an instant, then Chantal looked
down again. "Do you know what they should be selling here?" she asked.
"What?"
"Inflatable
Golems."
"
Brilliant! A million-dollar idea. Inflatable Golems in all sizes. It could be
bigger than Mickey Mouse," I said enthusiastically. Laughing uncontrollably
at the idea I almost fell off the bridge, just at the spot where the legendary
St. John of Nepomuk was thrown into the water in this city of heretics. Heresies
and defenestrations. Regaining my balance, I elaborated our daydream: "It
could be sold as both a religious fetish and a sex object. I see it now. We could
have a huge hot air Golem-balloon floating above the city."
Carrying on we crossed the river. Suddenly, the crowd thinned.
Both of us were dazzled by the sunny gaudiness of the baroque St. Nicholas
Church, a symbol of Jesuit wealth dripping with gold. From there we huffed
and puffed up the steep hill to Hradcany, that oriental-like complex of palaces,
galleries, churches, convents, ministerial buildings and residences from where
centuries of successive governments have administrated. Then down 'The Golden
Lane', a little village of houses and laboratories in the midst of a castle
complex. Built for alchemists by Rudolph II -- Rabbi Loew's patron -- it guaranteed
that these mystics would be nearby, close at hand to take part in state decisions.
Then wandering haphazardly, downhill, and back toward the river, through zigzagging
labyrinthine alleys, we emerged, appropriately enough, on a small eighteenth-century
square dominated by the American Ambassadorial residence of Shirley
Temple Black.
Prague is the Good Ship Lollipop.
One evening we went for an early dinner at U Kalicha (In the Chalice) on Na
bojisti; a side street undergoing restoration and gentrification -- like so
much of this city -- in the Nove Mesto. It was here that the Czech writer Jaroslav
Hasek (1883-1923) came for eating and drinking and getting inspiration for
his modest world-famous hero The Good Soldier Svejk, the novel that begins
in this cafe.
Although we hadn't made reservations we were lucky to get one of the smaller
wooden tables near the door. Quite to my delight the cafe-restaurant was preserved
in its pre-World War I atmosphere. Almost nothing had changed. Czechoslovakia
is home of the original Big Bud, but I ordered a large glass of the most excellent
tasting, heady amber-colored Pilsner Urquell. Chantal had a glass of fruity
yet dry Moravian white wine. For dinner, we both took roast goose and dumplings
with sauerkraut, a meal whose colors were similar to much of the interior decoration
in this land, and settled down for a deep gossip.
About Politics:
" If France would have an election now," Chantal said, "Le Pen
would have twenty per cent of the vote. He draws a lot of support from the people
of our generation who are dissatisfied with bourgeois politics. Who feel immigration
is invasion. Like having foreigners billeted in your house without permission.
The American Indians couldn't stop emigration they say. And look what happened
to them. Now they live on reservations. Also his party's excellent environmental
program has a strong appeal.
About Sex:
Chantal
scanned the full restaurant, carefully appraising each and every
man from behind expensive French sunglasses. Turning
back toward me she said, smiling, "Young Czech men look
okay, but by middle age they all look unappetizing. A married
friend
of mine took a lover on holiday. He was fifteen years younger.
She assured me, when you taste boy-flesh it can be difficult
to recover. But I don't like young men. Their bodies are too
hard.
Besides, I prefer longer, stable relationships. When we were
young we lived in a frenzy. We didn't know whether the next
step would
toss us over the precipice, or bring us to heaven."
"Youth," I protested cynically, "is
not exclusively the age of folly."
About Art:
We finished dinner and ordered more to drink. Chantal said she felt very proud
when Le Monde published a full-page photo of hers as a cover to their
Cannes Film Festival Special issue. I spoke of liking sleazy magazines.
"What do you mean?" she asked.
"Well, I get published in so-called serious literary and
art magazines. Last year though I got a particular warmth
in getting an article in a glossy, full-color specialist publication;
it's
exclusively about women who shave their pussy, or their head.
The feature-stories have the fascination of all obsessions.
It's
hard
to dismiss out of hand language of such poetic strength.
The photos readers send in are... Well, for me, they are an expression
of
populist surrealism, a kind of dada of the people's will."
Chantal was shocked by my levity. "What about Proust, Bataille,
Céline, Artaud, Anais Nin?!?"
"What about them?"
"Would they have published their work in magazines like that?!?"
"Actually all the writers you mentioned were sexually kinky.
They would jump at the chance."
Women do not appreciate sarcasm, alternatively blasted and blessed as the lowest
form of humor and as the most profound expression of grief. This trope and
perhaps other things too, made Chantal annoyed. But it also underlined a distance
that was developing between us. Alternatively, possibly it was only Chantal
creating neutral ground between herself and the living universe, a compensatory
comfort in her distress and a bulwark against her increasing disillusionment.
We became ashamed of our growing hostility. It made us vulnerable.
Our last night at the small apartment Chantal appeared from just
having taken a shower. The radio was playing Antonin Dvorak's haunting
Romance in F Minor for Violin and Orchestra. I looked up from writing
a poem about how, that in the absence of any standards, Andy Warhol
gets equal billing on the posters of post-communist Prague along
with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Vaclav Havel. She advanced, gliding
across the room, an aphonic form of continuity in space, then stopped
and stood poised, on little feet, like a dancer anticipating the
next move, denying the last. She had removed the make-up from her
face, which now shined and made her look even more juvenile. She
was wearing snow-white cotton pajamas that exaggerated this; square
cut in the Japanese style. I liked middle-aged women who had the
cool passion to play the Madonna. I also liked, even loved, Chantal.
Love is not the communication of bodies, but of personalities, souls,
who communicate through bodies, that is, through love-making, and
who thereby express their own changes and their perception of the
beloved. Love is the gift of oneself to another person and this is
the highest idea we can entertain about love, and love-making another
attribute of the deity as revealed through nature and nature's laws.
Bob Black wrote in The Abolition of Work: "The optimum
sexual encounter is the paradigm of productive play. The participants
potentate each other's pleasures, nobody keeps score, and everybody
wins." We love because it is absurd, an anarchic conquest of
everyday reality. As I announce often on my radio program: "Love
is a twelve bar blues/Love is your blue suede shoes/Love is a drawn
sword/Love is its own reward/Love is like a piece of gold/Hard to
get, difficult to hold."
I removed my reading glasses, capped my fountain pen, rose from the
table and took a few steps across the tiny room. We kissed standing
up, near the two-toned
enamel stove in a second-world kitchen that looked like a stage set left over
from "I Remember Mama" -- a '50s television series about a Swedish
immigrant family in America. We traded saliva. I felt Chantal's firm shape through
thick cotton. The contours of our bodies merged and she pressed herself against
me, moving with animal rhythm. She unzipped my fly.
"Do you want me to masturbate you with my feet?" she asked.
We were both
fully clothed, except I was hanging, limply, from my pants.
Chantal sat down, extended her legs, and tickled me with her
toes. Then grasped me between her callused feet, rubbing in
an unsyncopated grinding motion.
One of the
things that always seemed to unite us was a liking for sixty-nine.
Some do. Some do not. For us this speaking in tongues was a
gourmet's delight, the desire for intimacy within a continuous
reciprocal sensation and not a crescendoed catharsis.
Nude again.
I spread her thighs with my elbows and her ass cheeks with
the palms of my hands. She grabbed me by the root and plunged
her mouth over whatever she wasn't grabbing with both hands.
We sucked. Contemplated our scattered sparks. Leisurely. Both
of us licking and nipping. Chantal, I remembered, liked a hard,
vigorous tongue tip against her clitoris. We formed a union
of opposites and the etheric energy coruscated through us.
Stand by! Stand by! The rocket was ready to fly. We zipped
it; we dipped it. We ripped it; we tipped it. We flipped it;
we whipped it. We rided and glided. We took off for a star
and the moon was not far. If we knew the word that would change
the world, we would shout it repeatedly, over and over again
above the trembling bed.
I disengaged, tossed her around on her back and concentrated on
her until she tensed arching her back, driving into my mouth and
giving into the high-pitched short squeak of shuddering relief.
She came
up to me. We kissed each other's mouth, and eyes. Chantal started
clawing my back again. I smacked her hard, and sharply, on
her backside a few times very quickly. She stopped.
I was on
my back. Chantal faced my feet showing me her straight shoulders,
rising from her narrow waist like a fan. She made me harder.
Kneeling, holding me with thumb and forefinger, she rubbed
the fleshy mushroomed tip against her growing moistness. Then
plop! She sat on me.
"Have
you read Henry James yet?" she asked, over her shoulder,
inserting her wetted index finger into my rectum. She flexed
the muscles inside her vagina, seesawed her bottom as I watched
her pump up and down, up and down, like in a close-up of a
porno film.
" This
is what it feels like to read Henry James."
Curving two
fingers inside my ass, she touched my prostate and started
tapping it.
I
wasn't sure I liked this. "Is this safe?" I asked,
vibrating in successive, indefinite parentheses of what, if
I might say,
was -- in this instance and possibly in certain fictional others
as well -- a pleasure of gritty aridity evaginating into inescapable
lush greenness from an unvisitable past.
Matching
my earlier flippancy, Chantal cynically parried: "The
only safe sex is when you leave your credit cards at your friend's
house."
We fell asleep curled up together on that narrow single bed. By
tacit agreement we had kept our appointment, sealed our bond and
now knew we should part. Chantal seemed to have many lovers at
this time. In each, including me, she would be remembered in our
loins, always.
Chantal was
going to stay in Prague a few days longer then visit the picturesque
cities of Tabor, Pilzen and Karlovy Vary before going back
to France. She had assignments to make photos of dance groups
at the Avignon Theater Festival. I was going to Warsaw. Taking
advantage of their newly convertible currency, a friend of
mine there wanted to involve me in his book publishing and
distribution business.
We embraced
with fuzzy laxness on a platform of the train station. No tears.
Was this the last time we would see each other? She said:
"It's
life, I mean-- it has worked out well for both of us, hasn't
it?"
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