Can't Think Straight:. Kiri Blakeley
We do soon enough, but then we spot a big group of middle-aged locals setting up a table behind us for some guy’s fiftieth birthday party.
“We should make out in front of them the whole time. They might like that,” I suggest.
“I have an idea. There’s this apartment. It’s near here.”
“I’m not going to your apartment.”
“I won’t lock the doors. You can run out at any time.”
“I’m not going to your apartment.”
I knew damn well I was going to end up in that apartment.
“Look,” he says, his eyes drilling holes into mine, “here’s the ground rules: no one takes off any clothes. If you take off your clothes, I’m kicking you out. And any time you want me to stop anything, you say so, and we stop.”
I had the feeling he’d gotten a lot of girls into bed with that little speech.
His apartment is your typical Brooklyn walk-up: hardwood floors, small rooms, a rundown kitchen and shabby bathroom. But nice views.
“You can see the penis building from here,” I remark, pointing out the old Williamsburgh Savings Bank building on Flatbush Avenue, the top of which is shaped like a phallus. It’s always auspicious to mention a penis as soon as you enter a man’s apartment.
“Where are your sex toys?” I ask. At the bar, Rahil had regaled me with his knowledge of sex toys. The man had moved to New York City only a few months ago, yet he’d already decided that the best sex shop in town was Tic Tac Toe on Sixth Avenue. I’d bought my first vibrator the week after Aaron left. I’d always been worried I might get “addicted” to one and not be able to climax without it. That turns out to be a fallacy.
Rahil leads me to his dresser and opens the top drawer. Inside is a whip, some kind of strange plastic stick with large beads on it (for the ass? the pussy?) and a vibrator.
“You’re not using any of that stuff on me, you know.” I meant the toys in the drawer, not toys in general.
“I wouldn’t exchange sex toys! That’s quite unhygienic. I always send them back to my ex-girlfriends.”
Quite thoughtful of him.
He shows me his box of specialty condoms, the “best condoms in the world,” he calls them. At least he uses condoms. And I appreciate that he isn’t hiding his dirty side from me as Aaron had done for so long.
We start off kissing on the couch, but soon that becomes too small. “Let’s move to the bed,” I suggest, knowing he won’t suggest it himself. Unlike a lot of men, he has self-control, and knows that a little patience will get him what he wants faster in the end.
We roll around on the bed and he puts his hands inside my panties, his fingers in my vagina. “That feels like a wet pussy to me,” he observes.
Here it is, the moment of truth. I put my hands down his pants and feel his cock. It’s a bit of a disappointment. I’d hoped it might be the “piece” that hung on Aaron. But I had to face it, the odds of finding that again might not be so good. At least it wasn’t tiny. It was doable. And besides, Rahil had a way with his fingers, a way of savoring foreplay, of making it the main meal, which made cock size somewhat irrelevant.
This man has ideas. He turns me around and fingers my pussy and ass from behind while kissing my neck. Three things at once! Impressive.
He’s so unabashedly sensual about everything. If I kiss his neck, it’s “I love having my neck kissed.” I could never get a reaction out of Aaron when I kissed his neck, so I would stop after one or two halfhearted pecks. When I bit and sucked on Rahil’s nipples, it was, “I love what you’re doing. It feels so incredible.” Aaron’s nipples had been off-limits for the entire time I’d known him. I wondered if Aaron had managed to tap into his sensuality with men—if he allowed them to turn him on where I couldn’t.
On the verge of coming for the first time (yes, there would be a second), I tell him a fantasy: that we are doing this in front of a bunch of strangers. I think he says, “I’d like to try that,” but I can’t be sure. My mind is elsewhere. After my second orgasm (he insisted on the encore), I begin to get a little nervous that my hand manipulations haven’t done much for him. After all, he still hadn’t come. But I needn’t have been concerned. When he decided it was his turn, he had no trouble. Good thing. In my state of mind, if there were any last-minute sagging of the penis, I would’ve taken it as a bright neon sign of latent homosexuality.
We smoke a cigarette on his couch. “It’s amazing that we managed to do all that and not take our clothes off,” I say.
“I knew we wouldn’t have done all that if we’d taken our clothes off.”
Neat trick, that.
I glance at my watch and say I have to go. It’s still early, but I don’t want to hang out and make postcoital chat. Plus, I tell him, I really need to eat something.
“Then we’ll go get something to eat,” he says.
“I said I needed to eat something, not we.”
“You meant to say ‘we.’ “
“No, I didn’t.”
Rahil walks me to 4th Avenue to find a cab. It’s biting cold and I lean into him. He puts his arm around me and doesn’t ask when we will see each other again.
I fly to Palm Beach to visit my grandfather, Bernardo.
Born into a noble Portuguese family, former diplomat, man about Georgetown, multilingual author whose first book was published at age twenty-four, and once so handsome he was under contract with a Hollywood studio because he resembled a more masculine Tyrone Power, Bernardo’s now ninety years old and preoccupied with his coming death. This, according to him, is set to happen any day now, despite his being in perfectly fine health, his mind as sharp as twenty-five-year-old’s, able to dredge up incidents, places, and people from decades ago with finely pointed fidelity.
Here’s a guy who’d always gone his own way: he’d had three wives (all gorgeous enough that they’d modeled professionally) and couldn’t stay faithful to any of them. His first wife, my paternal grandmother, had been the recipient of one of his most audacious displays of womanizing: three days into their Catskills honeymoon, he’d snuck off to cheat on her with another newlywed.
Of course, he’s an old man now, his Don Juan days behind him. He’s lonely, tottering around his tiny Palm Beach apartment. It would have been nice if he’d had a wife to keep him company. But they probably would have driven each other nuts. Besides, we all die alone.
My grandfather had heard about the breakup but not the reason for it. When I get to the “He’s GAY!” part, he does the standard-issue “What?!” Then, unlike anyone else I’d told, he starts laughing. “I thought it would be something more dramatic.”
“More dramatic than that? You set the bar pretty high.”
“Why would he want to be with a big hairy man when he could have you?”
“Actually, it’s big hairy men he prefers. How’d you know?”
At dinner, I ask my grandfather if any of his marriages had been “open.”
“With Roxie,” he says, naming his third wife. “She liked women. She’d bring them home for a threesome. She loved to go down on me while the woman went down on her.”
Yep, this from my ninety-year-old paterfamilias. We’d never limited our conversations to grandfather-approved topics like heartburn and baseball.
“Did you ever get insecure because she liked women so much?”
“To