Our eyes always met when Ruth came into the rare bookshop. Over time our gazing would linger just a bit too long in a searching way as if each of us had some deep, but not quite conscious, curiosity about the other person.
Ruth was perhaps a decade older than me with a rather thick body, yet she carried herself with the physical awareness and pride of a dancer. When she spoke it was with an expressive precision characteristic of someone who truly loves language.
Ruth's taste in books was unconventional and fascinating. First she purchased a quite scarce first edition of Krafft-Ebing's 1886 Psychopathia Sexualis which chronicles every imaginable sexual aberration and perversity.
Later she bought a pricey book containing some of the edgier and more transgressive photography of Robert Mapplethorpe.
When she walked in today asking if I asked if I had a copy of Kristeva's "Abjection and Melancholy" I just kind of blurted out that I often thought the abject was quite beautiful.
Now "abject" is a bit of a slippery term but it usually associated with bodily waste, or what is cast away as foul, or associated with degradation. I had grown up in a house where everything good was supposed to be clean and everything dirty was bad. However my tastes in sex had flipped that equation a bit since from the very beginning dirtier was better.
If my partner's orgasm was so strong she lost control and pissed or farted when she came it just added a raw lovely level of unhinged and rapturous release to our play. Discovering the intricacies and wonders of the g-spot and how to turn a trickle into a gush made me and my partners ever so happy. Gulping copious squirt felt almost like a bonding sacrament, even a kind of Eucharist. And combining anal and vaginal play so that coming was twinning of the pleasures of both worlds was paradise. And I liked the dark pungencies of her ass smells almost as much as the sublime layered smells of her arousal. And my mouth on and in a partner's ass, what pure delight. Taking the time to make a partner's rectum relax into a sloshy wet openness so I can get my mouth beautifully deep inside her has always seemed to be one of the greatest pleasures of life. Do that right and you can make her squirm with pleasures she didn't even know existed. And if her fingers or mouth found my ass that was fabulous too.
But I hadn't experienced any of that sublime messiness for a while since I had been single for several months when I blurted my bit about thinking the abject was beautiful. Ruth's response to my words was a stare that was at first so icy and cold my throat constricted but I could not turn away. It was almost like we were locked in one of those staring contests you have as a kid; but this one felt urgent, and piercing and almost like a kind of brinkmanship, as if something that mattered immensely was at stake.
Finally breaking the stare I told her that I didn't have the abjection book but that I thought it would be interesting to meet for coffee. Ruth agreed and we decided to meet that weekend at a nearby café. She left the store without lingering or making a purchase.
It was close to closing time and I started straightening shelves and stocking some new acquisitions but I kept wondering about Ruth and how her mind worked and what she wanted from life not just in the obvious way but what her own deep inner urgencies were.
About five minutes before it was time to lock up for the night Ruth walked in through the front door. I felt a surge of excitement run through my entire body: adrenaline, testosterone but something else as well and I felt a bit of weak in the knees. I swallowed hard and was about to greet her when she spoke.
"Thomas, I'm not a patient person and I think I would prefer if you just come home with me now."
I shook my head up and down and sort of pushed out the single word "yes" and told her it would take me about five more minutes to close up. She asked for a paper and pen and wrote down her address which would turn out to be a small craftsman home in the Berkeley hills. She asked me to give her twenty minutes so I took my time with closing the shop and driving the two or three curvy miles to her home.
I was strangely excited as I spotted the numbers on Ruth's home, pulled alongside the curb and walked up the steps to her porch. I adored Craftsmen homes and always felt they made time a little fluid as if suddenly it could be 1920 as easily as the present day. That feeling swirled into an intimation that Ruth was going to be quite unlike any other women I had known and her door might just be portal into a bit of a different world.
I knocked on the door and Ruth greeted me warmly and thanking me for coming ushering me inside. One entire wall of the living room was floor to ceiling bookshelves. Glancing at them I was immediately struck by the number of art and photography books which we immediately began talking about. She had fascinating tastes, lots of Man Ray, Francesca Woodman, Nan Goldin, Rineke Dijkstra, Joel Peter Witkin, and Robert Mapplethorpe. I saw the Mapplethorpe book I had sold her but it was only one of perhaps ten on her shelf about that fascinating artist. Clearly Ruth was at home with edgy and transgressive art that pushed the boundaries. Talking with her about her books was lovely and comfortable. She described the way books for her were portals of discovery. That is something I might have said and as we talked on a bit excitedly a weird sense of twinship, at least with respect to art, was becoming obvious to us both.
Then, as if she had a particular agenda in mind, she turned and said enough of books for now and ushered me into a high backed chair and pulled up another one to sit down so our knees were just inches from each other. She bent down and removed each shoe so she was barefoot. Glancing at her pale feet I saw she didn't wear polish but obviously she took good care of her feet. I expected we would keep up the dialogue but I wrong.
Ruth launched into a monologue that really left no pauses. I didn't mind a bit. In a half hour I learned of her job teaching philosophy at Berkeley, and of what had been a painful divorce five years ago. I learned of her absolute distrust of the whole idea of love and how she thought a bond between two people really thrived with honesty, self-revelation and an attentiveness to the inner reality of the other person. She indicated that she was quite sure that most people get tripped up with the word love, with routine and compromise, and seeing ideals instead of substance.