Larry Ross , Evergreen N0.55, April.'68

3. Yolande

This time he did not dismiss the event, but every once in a while would practice "sitting" unsupported. He would start from a reclining position on the floor, propping himself up on the heels of each hand, and lift first one hand, then attempt to lift the second but before he even began to do so he was convinced he would crumple onto his posterior and invariably he did, uncomfortably. In other words while sure of his previous experience he could not overcome the certainty of failure when actually engaged in the physical act. He was overwhelmed by the evidence of his own perceptions. He tried to counter this sense of impotence with a two-pronged approach: one, a steeling of his nerve, a total concentration, and two, a tensing of all his muscles and tendons, espcially of the legs and posterior, but to no avail. He was not obsessed with this exercize, but as weeks passed into months and then a year, he began to despair of ever getting it right again. In fact, he began almost to doubt again of having really done it, and would sneak a look at the undeveloped negative, but each time his attention was caught (or distracted) by his apparent erection. Well, he got on with his life in any case, travelling to Brussels, his city of origin, where he met a barely twenty-year-old, lavishly endowed Bruxelloise with large breasts and a hefty bottom, to whom he became quite attached, engaging in much poetic and mystical conversation with her, but never referring to his peculiar interest. She was however exceedingly jealous of her virginity, however much he pressed her, even though she was otherwise generous with her womanly attributes. She was quite ?Catholique? and in those days that still meant something. He became friendly with her family, of the petite noblesse, the father a man of dilettantish literary claims, and no doubt they saw in him a potentially promising son-in-law. One weekend he was invited to stay at their house in the country, perhaps with some parental cunning, and well after everybody had gone to bed, he could no longer bear the sheer ache of desire for her, and clad in his pajamas crept through the darkened corridor to her room. He found her sitting up in bed as if waiting for him in a large frilly white shift, and, heart pounding, proceeded to reach through the deep neckline to gather the soft breasts in both hands. His erection was undeniable. She was breathing deeply, clearly in a state of extreme excitement and near panic. Still, with a curiously contradictory self-control, she asked him, between passionate kisses, if his intentions were serious. Furiously frustrated and indignant, he sat down with his arms clutched to his sides, as if to detach himself from her. A huge erection poked up through the crotch of his pyjamas. The girl, out of her wits and nearly hysterical, lifted her frothy skirts and straddling him, sat down on the rigid member. She rose and fell on it, riding him like an Amazon, shaking her breasts like a mad woman, and he bit them and bit her neck and her arms around his neck, until he came in huge creamy swoops inside her, his groans mingling with her entreaties that he be quiet and not wake her family. She lay in his arms with him still inside her, and they exchanged kisses and sweet words and (on his part) false promises, and it was only when she finally began to pull off him and stood up and the wetness streamed between his thighs, not only sperm but as he found afterwards, the virginal blood, that he realized he had been sitting on nothing. To be more circumstantial: when she lifted off him (he slipping out of her), and he watched her hurry away to the bathroom clutching the shift between her thighs, he had remained in his sitting position and only then perceived that he was sitting on nothing, i.e., he was in a ?chair? position, legs vertical up to the knees, then horizontal knees to to hips on a right angle, and trunk vertical on another right angle, intersected by the still rigid member, as he reclined lazily ? but in no chair or sofa. There was none there. Apparently when he had sat down with arms pressed against his sides, he had settled on nothing in another of those anti-gravitational postures. He had begun to straighten out awkwardly from this sitting/non-sitting position, trying to figure out where to unbend first like a beach-chair, when she came running back into the room, loose shift floating open about her large breasts shimmering and shaking in the dark and her dark pubic triangle and flung herself onto his lap weeping and and pleading, will you marry me, will you marry me, you have taken my maidenhood (?ma viginite? she said), but he collapsed with her on top of him on the floor, he could feel her wet thighs about his belly, genitalia all crushed together.The racket was terrible, lights went on down the hall, and fearing a family confrontation and a shotgun engagement, he slipped out from under her, cowardly, and raced down the hall in the opposite direction as anxious parental voices rang out and he could still hear her weeping probably stretched out on the floor. The next morning breakfast was a stony-faced affair, he was ignored by her father and glared at by her mother, and Yolande turned an occasional piteous glance in his direction, and between a hastily downed cup of coffee and a mumbled goodbye and a peck on her cheek, he got across the threshold somehow and out into the fresh small rain of the Brussels day. What preoccupied him throughout that day however was not the family scandal (which would come),but an exhilaration with this third floating-on-air, for want of a better expression, event. Something to do with the clutching of his arms to his sides when he ?sat? down. And of course total unconsciousness, or unselfconsciousness ? of the act. So now he began practicing again, abruptly rigidifying arm and posterior muscles, thighs and basin locked in the 90 degree angles, and slumping down into a sitting position without premeditation, as if to catch himself unawares. And for an instant he would find himself sustained on nothing, before he fell again to the floor. It was, nonetheless, encouraging, even quite thrilling, if bruising. Of course that instant was so brief that it left room for some self-doubt in such a mystical affair. Later he heard from his mother that Yolande had left for Africa and returned with an infant shortly thereafter, which she, his mother, bitterly upbraided him for. However when he actually met the child, he discovered it was a delicious milk chocolate hue, so that if any blame could be laid at his threshhold, it was only in the most indirect moral sense.