THE SEX REBEL OF JESUSLAND, mini-chapter 65

65. AFTERGLOW

They did not speak one word for the next half-hour.

When they did speak, it was as if nothing had happened. They didn’t want to acknowledge what had taken place. It had been too intense, too beyond, too animal.

“Sandwich?”

“Please.”

“I’ll make you a double-decker.”

They wanted to forget that they could drive each other to such a loss of self, such a total abnegation of humanity. They knew it now: lying together, they brought out the beast in each other, the beast that civilization tells us to avoid. This was why there were rules of behavior, to control this. This was why the Bureau existed, to tame this.

It was enough to know they did it. They didn’t have to discuss it. In any event, who had words for such behavior? It needed a pre-verbal language. It required the communication of the primitive. It necessitated a dialect forged from groans and grunts. It was not real. It was not religious. It was not Christian. It was not American.

Adam wanted to tell Eve that he loved her, but he could not find the same intimacy in their silence as they had experienced in their noise. He should have told her then, when they were thrashing each other. Now there was a distance in her silence.

They finished their food. Then he kissed her, and they made love again. Now I will tell her I love her, Adam thought. They made slow, gentle, soft love.

“I love you,” he said, and then he came, and he made her come with his coming, and she made him come with her coming, their coming made each other come, they came each with the other’s coming. Knowing that she was about to come, and knowing that he was about to come, was why they came. Each had come in the other’s coming, a true coming together.

Eve did not reply or react to his declaration of love. She thought he was just saying words, but he meant it. He came with love, and she came with pleasure, pleasure in his pleasure, but not pleasure in his love. She came because she was excited he came. His excitement made her come, not her excitement. Did that make her dependent on him? No, she decided. Now, more than grateful to him for coming, she felt proud of herself for coming. He did it to her, but she also did it for herself. Something else happened to her, something secret and warm and quite magnificent, which gave the whole thing an immense private intensity, with a meaning she still had to figure out. At the moment of coming, she flew into a dream, and dreamed her dream in daylight: a dream of the three trees, with the center tree changing into an angel, and the two trees on either side becoming its wings, and her spirit soaring as the angel soared. God had once reached down across the universe and planted his seed in an earthly woman, Mary, the mother of Jesus. Now Eve felt she had experienced the reverse, reaching out from earth and touching God.