I was in love with Paul, of course. I say 'of course' because that's how it felt to me, natural, honest, and so inevitable that it hardly seemed worth talking about. But my friends were nowhere near so matter of fact about it. They behaved as if some tiny, previously undetected flaw in my makeup had suddenly opened up to become an emotional chasm as deep and as dangerous as the san Andrea's fault.
"I can't believe it," was Xavier's first comment when I told him. " Have you gone batty?"
"No battier than usual, " I said. Besides, darling, everyone should fall in love once in a while."
"You've confused love with multiple orgasm," he said, shaking his head with bitterness that I found quite surprising. " If three means love, then I suppose at five you get married and move to the suburbs."
"I have no such plans, and I haven't bothered to count the orgasms," I said, and walked out without another word.
Xavier's attitude -- which was mirrored by that of the great majority of my friends -- disturbed me at first, but only momentarily. I was quite simply too happy with my newborn love to have my bubble burst by something as trivial as other people's opinion.
And we were happy. I underline it now because it was a happiness so short lived as to make one wonder if it had every existed at all. But it was real enough then, in those first few months, as we explored one another's spirits and minds and found them just as delightfully suited to each other as our bodies proved to be.
I left my apartment on Park Avenue in New York (this alone flabbergasted Xavier, who had been used to my complaints about the slack jawed mindlessness of the typical southern Californian) and moved into a crow's nest apartment that had once belonged to Isadora Duncan. Paul continued to maintain his studio, but we in effect lived together in the little white perch of an apartment with its serene view of the Lonnie canal bridges.
I painted a great deal during those months, the first time I had been able to discipline myself along these lines since I had ended my girlhood in Vermont. The results were encouraging enough to make me think I could make a career of my art if everything else in my life suddenly evaporated. In the meantime Paul continued to develop his own art, which I always saw -- and still do see -- as the most difficult, time consuming, and individual in the world.
His dedication was astounding. He would spend hours, even days, perfecting the simplest of mime movements -- running his hands along an invisible wall, for example, or descending a set of imaginary stairs into an imaginary cellar. He had an intensity and an ability to concentrate that positively unnerved me at times, as if he could turn his senses of sight and sound on and off at will, and simply plunge into the heart of himself where he could be neither disturbed nor distracted. There were times when I swore he had stopped breathing entirely, so still could he stand and so great a control could he exert over what are supposed to be involuntary functions. It even seemed that he could say 'yes ' or 'no' to the messages sent from brain to muscle, could, in effect, hibernate on his feet.
But as impressive as Paul's raw talent and his mental discipline were to me, I was even more impressed by his unswerving integrity. Talent is not specialized; it's a crude, undifferentiated force that can be channeled in almost any direction. Paul could have been a wonderful actor, or dancer, or comedian, all potentially more lucrative than mime, which most people (most Americans, at any rate) saw as a curiosity, a sort of circus-y activity that belonged in the same category with tightrope walking -- at which Paul also excelled -- and pink touted ladies doing toe dances on horseback.
Paul knew all this, of course. He knew that had he chosen an easier, broader route he could easily have been a major star -- on television, if nothing else. (God forbid that this should have come to pass.) But he was convinced that he could educate the public, could show them through his own performance that mime was the deepest, most universal form of drama that the world of the stage had to offer.
"I know it," he would say suddenly, as we lay in each other's arms after a sweet afternoon's lovemaking." I know I can do it."
"Do what, darling?" I would murmur, rolling my spent body against the hard muscles of his chest.
"Take mime with me," he would say. "Right to the top."
"Of course you can, darling."
"What?" he would say, startled out of his reverie. At such times I think he truly forgot my existence, so feverish was he in his devotion to what he saw as his life's goal.
"Never mind," I would say, and slide my lips down the length of his gorgeous torso until I enveloped his freshly stirring cock in my soft lips.
It seemed I could never quite get enough of the man. As lush and as powerful and as ultimately satisfying as our lovemaking was, there was something about his body, about the essence of his maleness, that stirred my own sexuality as no other had before. We would screw each other until we nearly dissolved in a pool of sweat and cum, and still I could not keep my hands to myself -- I had to be touching him, fondling him, fanning the flame in him until his proud cock stood ready once more to plunder my almost insatiable pussy.
There were times when something as simple and as seemingly innocent as a kiss, or even a slight brushing of the hands, would lead to a session of roaring sex that could last hours, days, in some instances. Some button had been pushed deep inside each of us, some central force had been activated, and it sometimes seemed that we were truly alive only when he was inside of me, when our bodies were melded in a fusion of the flesh, when we were screaming out our climaxes as inauguration to a deep new morning of love.
