The lust started for him almost automatically, as if entering Southeast Asia were pinioning sexual engines upon his libidinal exercises. His cruel memories of the Vietnam War quieted under the weight of phallic dominance, the pressure to copulate at any cost. And so he arrived in Ho Chi Minh City where he booked a room at a rather swanky hotel and visited the spa. He hadn't asked for it when he went into the massage room, but there she was, a pretty little Vietnamese girl who was a particularly good little whore. After she massaged his back, she turned him over and asked him, "Do you want me to do that?" She was pointing at his penis and he eagerly nodded yes. As she started pumping on his now erect penis, she told him to touch her, and so he pushed his hand down the back of her shorts and began squeezing and massaging her ass, and then he grew bold and started finger fucking her. She then pulled down her loose fitting shirt and offered her breast to him, which he greedily began sucking on. The next day, they decided to have sex, and after slipping into a condom, she sat astride him and pumped back and forth until the beauty of the orgasm came to fruition. This was his first sexual encounter here, something that was just sort of an accident that the massage therapist he got also happened to be a prostitute.
This experience rather lightened the load on his expectations of what life would be like here. He was actually headed to Cambodia where he was due to pick up a post at a university there. As he was entering Phnom Penh for the first time, he could almost here the screams of the Khmer Rouge victims hovering in the air where their surely earthbound ghosts strained against the pain that seared into their very souls and left them eternal wanderers in a matrix of severed connections from the body which provided no relief from the extravagances of spiritual trauma so deep had it sunk into their very being that not even the release of death could stop the showering accelerants of suffering.
Leonard could feel the presence of ghosts everywhere. He was naturally superstitious and had even sampled Santeria and Voodoo, but he found they were too ritualistic and reliant on tradition for his tastes in the area of spirituality. He knew Cambodians were quite superstitious themselves, as he had heard, into fortune-tellers and ancestor worship. The Buddhist tradition didn't seem to have the impact on society he thought it would, as he observed in his first few weeks here, because the young weren't really interested in religious matters, so the practice of Buddhism was quite circumscribed in its uses and influence. His interest in Eastern religions, or Western ones for that matter, was very peripheral but he had learned some Tantric practices, one of the most useful of which was learning how to hold an erection for a couple of hours. When he would pleasure the woman, the moment she went into the orgasmic thrill, it would go on for several minutes, and later she would learn to sustain it for even longer. So now he was in search of high quality sexual experiences, which, he supposed, had in a way become his method of spirituality. But he was feeling his age, and he was actually beginning to experience the spiritual paucity in Cambodia's atmospheric ambience. And he began feeling sorry for people. For the young children in the sex trade where unscrupulous sex tourists would take partners as young as five. For the landmine victims missing limbs and having to make they're living panhandling down at the riverside. He even saw a man who had no arms or legs and propelled himself down the street with his stumps, where, between his upper ones, he carried his begging bowl. There was misery to be had here, but there was also the joy of living in a rather congenial place, and of course there were girls.
Leonard paid for a rather expensive massage, about $35 for two hours, and with his luck still in place, he received a massage from a little Cambodian girl, who, when she had put him on his back, began to massage near his penis, and he thought, it couldn't be, not again. And then yes, she was fingering the tip of his penis and rubbing the stalk. After awhile, she stopped and moved to the other side of his body where she worked her way up to this thigh, took his erection in her hands again, and got him off. His sexual adventures always seemed confined to massage therapy sessions, and he really fell into the sexual contact always by accident. He really didn't feel like the bar scene, where "taxi girls" were there for the having, but something interesting began to transpire at work. He had been teaching at a university called Pannasastra University of Cambodia, or PUC, and one night, he left his bag after his last class, which was also the last session of the day. He frantically drove his motorcycle back and found that there was some people there sitting down in the entrance. The nice young lady who sat at the information desk had saved the bag for him, and told Leonard that she had rifled through it a little to see who it belonged to and that she was very glad that he had come back for it. Leonard suddenly realized that this young girl had a handsome face, not overly pretty, but not homely either, but he found her rather attractive. She had a nice slim body, with a killer ass, and medium-sized breasts that protruded in an attractive fashion given the slightly tight fitting clothes she wore.
"May I have your number in case I ever need you to hold onto my bag again?" Leonard asked.
"Sure," she said. And she wrote down her number which Leonard immediately fed into his iPhone. "Well, see you later," he said. "Thanks again for looking after my bag."
The conversation they had was so mundane, but her face, her body, her smell, the very swept back position of her hair, haunted him for some reason. So, two days later, he messaged her, asking her if they could be friends. She messaged back saying that she would really like to. And so the conversations began. They called each other, Chanta rambling on in the long-winded way she had of expressing her opinions of which she seemed to have a lot. But Leonard found it relaxing to hear her voice opine for hours over the phone, with her worried about his minute supply and he just assuring her that he could simply buy some more; it was no big deal. She would complain about her living situation, having to take a small room in the university building itself. She kind of had a bad attitude toward the rich, since she felt her own poverty keenly, even though she was studying in the academic wing of the university to get a bachelor's degree in English in which she was already very proficient. Their relationship seemed innocuous enough; just the ongoing testing of the waters of whether something other than friendship would blossom. Leonard would visit her little room at the university and longingly put his arm around her shoulders, something she didn't seem to mind, so he would take her hand in his, and stroke it softly.
"You're not traditional Cambodian," Leonard told her once. "You let me touch you without even knowing my intentions. What if I wanted to have wild sex with you all of a sudden; what would you think then?"
"You rape me, I kill you," she said.
"Woh, Woh," Leonard said scooting away from her a little. "I only take willing victims."
"So you admit you rape women."
"I suppose it depends on what you mean by rape," Leonard said. "Some girls liked to be ravished as if the man they were having sex with were being rough for her benefit, not his. People have odd ways of dealing with sexual desire. Besides, real rape isn't really about sex, but about power. The rapist wants to subjugate and humiliate the woman to traumatize, to use love as a weapon that will implant an idea in the mind of the woman that love hurts, so that every man who touches her in the future will cause a shiver."
"How come you know so much about it?" Chanta asked.
"I know a lot about all things sexual," Leonard said. "The secret is taking pleasure in the woman's pleasure as well as your own. Men often don't know that they will have a more fulfilling sex life that way. A lot of guys just want to get off and could care less about the woman's orgasm. The number of women who have sex without ever achieving an orgasm is surprisingly high. It starts with the tongue," and Leonard stuck out his tongue flicking it up and down. Chanta hit him in the arm.
"Stop," she said. "You still haven't answered my question about how you know so much about rape."
"Let me explain," Leonard said. "Some women in Europe and the United States think that all marital sexual relations are a form of rape. They seem to think that if it's the woman's idea, then it isn't misogynistic. Otherwise, the man is just being a caveman, showing his dominance and using his phallus as a weapon to control his perpetually unfulfilled woman. There is much truth in that because even though I wouldn't go as far as these feminists calling marriage an institutionalization of rape, they make a good point about the initiation ritual and the interest in the woman's pleasure. Like I said, all sex is a twisting up of love, since it really doesn't contribute anything to the relationship, it just satisfies some ambiguous biological drive. Some people seem to need it more than others; some people don't even really like it that much. There's more anhedonia in the world then you would believe. The damn Christians have so weighted down people's personalities with the consciousness of sin that they have succeeded in making every minor infraction, especially in the sexual area, a great burden the individual has to carry until they manage to expiate it. Are you understanding anything I'm saying?"
"About every third word. What's misogynistic?"
"It refers to the hatred of women."
"Is it common?"
