Working the Aisles by Robert Appelbaum

Author:Robert Appelbaum [Appelbaum, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-78279-356-4
Publisher: John Hunt Publishing
Published: 2014-05-29T16:00:00+00:00

When I met her, a fair-haired woman in her early thirties, the bells rang, the stars twinkled. I felt almost as if I had known her in a previous life, she understood me so completely. She could finish my sentences. She could listen to me, and listen some more, and then cause me to want to listen endlessly to her. And she was erotic. With me. For the first time in four years, from the moment I first met here, I was back in the zone. I knew where I was. I knew what I desired. And I could feel that I was desired in return. Yes, there was that feeling – where had it gone to? It had so passed out of my life that I had forgotten what it felt like. But I was remembering it now.

We got drunk in a Mission District café. We talked about Derrida and Lacan, whom she was dying to know more about, and about whom I pretended to have some understanding. She was a graduate student in psychoanalytically-oriented psychotherapy, doing research under a famous professor, but she was so tired of the positivism all about her, the fixed meanings, the literalism, the naiveté, the formulaic results-orientation of her scientifically-minded teachers and colleagues. She wanted to move beyond that. She wanted to do things with language, to deconstruct, to write, to be creative, to challenge the psychoanalytic status quo. She was so glad she met me … We got a little drunker, and then we went back to her apartment, a walk-up studio in what had formerly been a Victorian mansion, and after talking and talking, finishing each other’s sentences, remarking on how much we thought alike and felt alike, we ended up in bed. First we sat at her small dining table, in the round bay of a window overlooking a slope of the Mission District and, below in the distance, the glimmering towers of downtown. ‘Oh, Bob, you are so right about that’, she would say. Or, ‘Oh Bob, that must have been painful for you. Or, ‘Bob, that’s so sexy.’ Then she was sitting on my lap. ‘You are really wonderful’, I was saying to her. ‘I can’t believe I’ve met you. I can’t believe we’ve made this connection.’

Our talk had soon turned graphically to sex. Alison wanted me to know that she was perverted. We were entering into something, it seemed, and as a premise of what we were entering into I had to be informed that Alison liked her sex strange. There were games she liked to play: for a starter, being given commands, being spanked, being led around with a dog leash. These were things of which I at the time, was, in practice if not in theory, unfamiliar. The language made me delirious. I was shocked and afraid – this was it, finally, this. I didn’t know if I would like it. I didn’t know if I could do it. Yet I was also aroused, provoked and entranced.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.