An offering for the
2023 Halloween Contest
.
****
"I have a passion for pudenda," said LaMonte, staring me straight in the face.
We were sitting in the living room of his third floor flat in Somerville, the Charles River off in the distance with Boston beyond. A chill October breeze rattled the window as he reached for his beer glass.
"You using the singular or the plural?" I cocked an eyebrow.
LaMonte shot me an annoyed look, his big brown eyes level and impatient in that long Jamaican-heritage face.
"You know Latin's not my strong suit, Kumar. You messin' with me? Spanish or German, even Russian I can do, but never did Latin. It's just how I've heard it said."
"What kind of linguist doesn't know a bit of Latin? I still want to know, singular or plural?"
"Plural. One is never enough."
"Even if you have the right one? Attached to the right person? A lifelong endeavor? Perpetual pudenda? I don't see anything wrong with that."
"
Pudenda
plural,
pudendum
singular," I continued, "although note the 'neuter' gender of the word. Lot of these ancient grammar rules defy logic. Neuter for a feminine attribute?"
LaMonte looked at me as if I were a pedant, which of course I was.
LaMonte and I had been arguing, with no appreciable effect on each other, since our days as grad school roommates. Ten years hadn't dimmed the verbal sparring even though our roommate era had ended long ago. I was over visiting on a free Friday night, as it sounded like he had plans for us later in the month.
He exhaled. "No, I misspoke. Singular. A singularity of sex. A single source of pleasure. A uniqueness so individual that I have been driven to distraction for nearly as long as I've known you. You know that well enough."
"Okay, I confess. I was messing with you. It's always plural. Even for the singular woman. But I get your meaning. You thinking about that girl again?"
Halloween was always a fraught time for my buddy. He had tailed a girl, what, almost ten years ago? We'd only been roommates for about a couple months then. The party had been a costume affair hosted by a fellow linguistics doctoral student and LaMonte had never gotten over the event. There's something about Halloween and adults dressing up that tends to lead to excitement of one sort or another.
"I'm on a mission, man. You know it's that time of year."
"Halloween? Right. Don't tell me you're still trying to find that woman?"
"That woman!" Both eyebrows went way up. "Not just 'that woman' but the one who granted me the most divine copulation, the one whose great white quim squeezed my member with such abandon..."
I snorted. "And pushed you off before you finished, barely in time for you to shower her belly with sperm."
He looked pained. "Exactly. A great regret. But not my greatest regret..."
"Right. You didn't even get her name. I still don't know how you managed to hook up with her in that upstairs room. How'd you ever manage to get that intimate? Without any preliminaries?"
"I have absolutely no idea. The night was a blur until that point. We must have been talking, and I don't even know about what."
"Because your attention had been focused, one pointedly I might add, entirely on her cleavage."
"She was dressed as Catherine the Great, man. In one of those regency dresses. Pale silvery tan if I remember right. Breasts pushed up and together in that tight top, bare shoulders, hair swept up so you could see her inviting, soft white neck. Even had one of those masks over her eyes that you held in place with a stick. Period perfect. Such a heavenly, inviting cleavage valley her costume created..."
"I had taken her to be Marie Antoinette, how did you know she was Catherine?"
"I must have asked. I don't remember, I just know." His eyes went off in the distance.
"You know the legend of how Catherine died?"
"Yep. One randy royal wench."
"It's not true. One of those myths. It did not involve a horse or anything like that."
"All I know is I want to find that girl again. If it is the last thing I do."
"You been kicking yourself forever. I can't believe you're still looking for her."
"It was a complex night, man. That masked ball at Jon Stubb's place. Our little adventure got truncated when our amorous embrace got interrupted by a couple other folks, looking for a private room for their own wanton dalliance."
"And she slipped away. Before you could get her name."
"Don't remind me, Cumar."
This was always his way to get a dig into me. My first name with its Kerala origins was mispronounced astonishingly often in North America, usually by older white guys reading the attendance roster at the beginning of class. "Kumar Kama" they'd read, but instead of 'COO-mar' they'd say 'CUM-are.' I would always patiently correct the instructor, but it didn't always take. I confessed this peeve to LaMonte once and regretted it forever since. Whenever he wanted to needle me he called me 'Cumar' or sometimes, even more annoyingly, shorten it to 'Cum.'
But LaMonte went back to his memories.
"God she was gorgeous. Long taffy-colored hair done up, sweet soft belly, hefty thighs. I had to pull that dress and all those petticoats up to get to her quim. But she was period perfect there too, no knickers in the way, just that darkly furred triangle of trouble to beckon me, goad my lust into impossible dimensions."
"Looked nice when semen slicked, I grant you that."
I had been in the room when he tailed her, the first and only time I ever witnessed his penis erect and out for a ride. It is always a bit unnerving to witness a copulation, and at that point I barely knew LaMonte. I got a pretty good look at the proceedings, her dress thrown up over her head, his dark brown body pressing lovely on her white skin, his sperm, after she had rather rudely yanked him out, spurting out over the expanse of a sweet, smooth, pale belly. The look on his face when he climaxed, his surprise at the unexpected ejection from her nethers.
"And the grip that quim had, I tell you, there's never been another like it."
Events had gone quite south immediately, however. We were interrupted, got separated in some confusion and LaMonte spent the next half an hour in the house, going from room to room, desperately trying to find the wench of his dreams, but she had vanished.
"So haven't you tried some basic detective work? Asked Stubbs if he knew her?"
"Don't you think I haven't exhausted every angle? Sure, Stubbs first, then every damn person I knew at that party. Don't think I haven't tried every approach?"
"But she wasn't at his Halloween party the next year. Or the year after. I've taken to going to every party with any possible connection, sometimes three a night. All I know is that she's luscious, likes to fuck, and attends Halloween parties."
"Maybe she's left town? Bet all the money in my wallet she's not looking for you."
Another withering look. "Doesn't matter if she is or isn't. I am after her. My over-educated, over-trained, hopelessly focused mind cannot accept the notion she isn't still around. A quim like hers cannot possibly stay empty for long, and she needs me more than she can ever suspect. I will find her, and fornicate with her again, at least once, if it is the last thing I do."
"I think your odds are exactly zero. So she let you put your organ of degeneration up her. I bet she likes sex. Maybe a lot. But her head was covered by that upswept dress! She wasn't even looking at you when you tailed her. And she pulled you off before your spawn even entered her."
"Lots of reasons for that. I can think of three at least. Birth control. STDs. She likes to see semen out in the open?"
"But she couldn't with her dress pulled up like that. Did she like you? No way to tell, and if she did she'd be looking to find your name and location. She's a big white girl, likely high status."
"She dug it man, I know it."
We stared at each other.
LaMonte had done linguistics at MIT while I finished my English degree. He does computational linguistics now, at a large company which I neither like nor will name, with an office here in Boston. Making way more money than I, a humble editor for a local law journal. But we were each doing what we'd been educated to do, nothing wrong with that.
LaMonte went back to wording again.
"Do you regard 'pudenda' as a collective noun?"
"Depends. You thinking linguistically or functionally?"
"What I really want is
cuntius grippius.
Did I get the grammar right? Noun/adjective agreement?"
"You'd better stick to pig-Latin, LaMonte. Neither one of those is a real word, never mind the case endings or anything."
"When it comes to cunt, I am race-blind Kumar. I just want grip. Give me a woman with a woke cunt, one who squeezes me like a python, and I will be putty in her hands."
"Or mouth. Or anywhere, far as I can tell. Look, LaMonte, it seems to me your phallocentric worldview has some intrinsic deficiencies."
"All I'm saying is that that girl got me in her grasp like no other. I was dying, dying man, to pump my sperm home but she pulled me off. She's a hot-cunted one, I tell you. The sight of my sperm, my spermaceti, coating her belly, the sheer delight she took in coaxing my semen forth, that is worth a long and hard search."
"Hard search indeed. Though you got a good song title in there, bro. 'Here's some spermaceti, coating your sweet belly/ Gonna make you mine, gonna make you come.' I'll have to work up the rest of the tune on my guitar, see how it sounds."
"Phallocentric, eh?" He sneered. "You think that's all I think about?"
"Not one hundred percent. Maybe ninety."
"So Cumar, you're telling me when you got an erection sitting between your legs you aren't phallocentric yourself?"
"Of course. What male isn't? But it's what's going to happen to that erection next, that's the deal. But you're one of those addictive personalities, LaMonte, luckily not literally, since you stay away from anything stronger than a good Cabernet or IPA. But obsessive? Absolutely."
LaMonte stood up. There was no doubt he was indeed in the grip of his own erection moment.
"You know nautical life much, Kumar? Boats, ships, tales of the sea?"
This sounded like a change-of-subject moment, but knowing LaMonte, I had my doubts.
"Some, not much. Read 'Horatio Hornblower' as a kid."