Beneath the Neon Egg Read Online Free Page A

sag, he can feel the dreamy smile in the dark. Would be nicer to have a warm body beside him now, to stroke with his palm, his fingers. Tender. He wonders why he will do it in his mind alone but not with Benthe and the others. Maybe because the others would still be there afterward, when his passion was spent and it was all revealed as fantasy but with real people still there. He doesn’t quite understand that. But remembers how it was to have Dorte there afterward up in Halvstrand. Couldn’t get away fast enough.
    And what you would do in heat and would repulse you after the fact. He thinks about a copy of Playboy he saved from a few years earlier, special on the thirtieth anniversary of the death of Marilyn Monroe. In it was a secret diary or transcript of a tape where she free-associated for her psychiatrist, and in which she claimed to have shaved Joan Crawford’s pussy and gone down on her. Also claimed that her agent had her piss in a champagne glass and drank it. He wonders if it was true. Exciting to think of when you’re hot, but repulsive when you’re not.
    Difference between fantasy and reality maybe. Or maybe because of my Catholic upbringing. Or maybe something else. Maybe I really don’t like sex but need it, like the idea of it. Who knows? Maybe it’s better than nothing. Maybe it has to be more than passion?
    With his ex, their passion was so hot but burned out fast and then they had two children. Mistake to marry so young in heat. But if they hadn’t, the kids would not exist. Is it so bad not to exist? Well, he wouldn’t know, would he? Because there would be no one to know. Strange thought. Having no consciousness. No existence.
    Do I like existing? Would I prefer not to?
    Cannot deny I am as confused as when I was a teenager. More confused. Because then I believed in romantic love. Now I wonder whether it is all just to procreate and nothing more, to keep the species going and for what end? And we are useless as autumn wasps, men, after we have procreated, as Sam once put it.
    He wonders whether the problem with Benthe is because she’s married. That religious thing again. The couple of times I fucked another man’s wife—even while one of the husbands was passed out drunk in the next room. I performed without hesitation, not feeling I did anything at all wrong until afterward; the regret rushed in like a foul wave of sewer vapor. Learned this about myself and tended to avoid repeating that kind of behavior. But somehow the flirting with Benthe went too far for me to stop myself. Then she sprang Dorte on me with her arthritic fingers taking my stiff rod. Actually wasn’t so bad. In memory. Kind of sweet. How she took it in her hand, fingers slow and careful in their deformity, and then looked into my eyes and smiled .
    Till afterward .
    Once, before I married, even with the husband’s consent. No, he directly asked me to because he wanted her to stop fucking some guy he hated. I knew about myself that I suffered moral hangovers that far outweighed the pleasure I got from certain things and that was one of those things. The five-year-old son of the father who gave me permission, asked me to, rattled the locked bedroom doorknob while I was fucking his mother and called through the door, “What are you doing in there, Mommy? What are you doing with Patrick?”
    That was in 1972. I was eighteen. Just after my father died. The seventies was the wildest decade, wilder than the sixties. Now we’ve been through the eighties and more than half the nineties. And glad I am free of my ex, glad my children exist. But what’s next?
    Not more of the seventies. Not Benthe on their disappearing cliff with her arthritic sister-in-law or her nude Greek post-sauna dances with hopping cocks and jiggling breasts. Don’t want to be with naked men.
    The couple downstairs is having one of their very rare arguments, but it’s a bad one, a divorce