Answered Prayers Read Online Free PDF Page A

only with the best, but I can’t finance enough of it to live with. Anyway, clutter is alien to my nature. Give me an empty beach on a winter’s day when the water is very still. I’d go mad in a house like Boaty’s.”
    Miss Langman was often, in interviews, described as a witty conversationalist; how can a woman be witty when she hasn’t a sense of humor?—and she had none, which was her central flaw as a person and as an artist. But she was indeed a talker: a relentless bedroom back-seat driver: “No, Billy. Leave your shirt on and don’t take off your socks the first man I ever saw he was in just his shirt and socks. Mr. Billy Langman. The Reverend Billy. And there’s something about it a man with his socks on and his billy up and ready here Billy take this pillow and put it under my that’s it that’s right that’s good ah Billy that’s
good
good as Natasha I had a thing once with a Russian Dyke Natasha worked at the Russian Embassy in Warsaw and she was always hungry she liked to hide a cherry down there and eat ah Billy I can’t I
can’t
take that without withoutso slide up honey and suck my that’s it that’s it let me hold your billy but Billy why aren’t you more! well! more!”
    Why?
Because I am one of those persons who, when sexually immersed, require serious silence, the hush of impeccable concentration. Perhaps it is due to my pubescent training as a Hershey Bar whore, and because I have consistently willed myself to accommodate unscintillating partners—whatever the reason, for me to reach an edge and fall over, all the mechanics must be assisted by the deepest fantasizing, an intoxicating mental cinema that does not welcome lovemaking chatter.
    The truth is, I am rarely with the person I am with, so to say; and I’m sure that many of us, even most of us, share this condition of dependence upon an inner scenery, imagined and remembered erotic fragments, shadows irrelevant to the bodyabove or beneath us—those images our minds accept inside sexual seizure but exclude once the beast has been routed, for, regardless of how tolerant we are, these cameos are intolerable to the meanspirited watchmen within us. “That’s better better and better Billy let me have billy now that’s uh uh uh it that’s
it
only slower slower and slower now hard hard hit it hard ay ay
los cojones
let me hear them ring now slower slower dradraaaaagdrag it out now hit hard hard ay ay daddy Jesus have mercy Jesus Jesus goddamdaddyamighty come with me Billy come! come!” How can I, when the lady won’t let me concentrate on areas more provocative than her roaring roiling undisciplined persona? “Let’s hear it, let’s hear them ring”: thus the grande mademoiselle of the cultural press as she bucked her way through a sixty-second sequence of multiple triumphs. Off I went to the bathroom, stretched out in the cold dry bathtub and, thinking the thoughts necessary to me (just as Miss Langman, in the private quietude beneath her public turbulence, had been absorbed in hers: recalling … a girlhood? overly effective glimpses of the Reverend Billy? naked except for his shirt and socks? or a honeyed womanly tongue lollipopping away some wintry afternoon? or a pasta-bellied whale-whanged wop picked up in Palermo and hog-fucked a hot Sicilian infinity ago?), masturbated.
    I have a friend, who isn’t queer but dislikes women, and he has said: “The only women I’ve got any use for are Mrs. Fist and her five daughters.” There is much to be said for Mrs. Fist—she is hygienic, never makes scenes, costs nothing, is utterly loyal and always at hand when needed.
    “Thank you,” Miss Langman said when I returned. “Amazing, someone your age to know all that. To have such confidence. I had thought I was accepting a pupil, but it would seem he has nothing to learn.”
    The last sentence is stylistically characteristic—direct, felt,yet a bit
enunciated
, literary. Nevertheless, I could more than see how valuable and