Date: Tue, 9 Jun 2009 14:03:51 +0200
From: Julian Obedient <julian.obedient@gmail.com>
Subject: Don't Forget You Love Me 2

I said fuck you to my job as a proofreader, and I vacated my room in
the rundown upper west side brownstone I was staying in where I shared
a kitchen with other roomers.

You are not going to go on with that proofreading job and you are not
going to continue living in that hole.

He had pinned me against the wall and was holding me so that I was
unable to move and had to hear him and understand that he meant what
he said.

You have no right to be self-destructive, he said.

You've read Camus, he said. It's perfectly alright to commit suicide,
but if you do not. If you choose not to commit suicide, that means you
commit to live, and if you commit to live, then you have got to know
what living entails. It means always giving meaning to the world
yourself, because actually there is no overriding meaning in the
world. But if there is no meaning in the world, life is death. So if
you reject death, then you have to have a real life. You have to give
yourself to life and take from life. And you don't. You are wasting
life.

I know, I said, and he let me go. I was free of his grip so that I
might draw my body up to his a stretch and draw his face down to me
and touch his lips with mine hoping he would take me into him
beginning with his lips and swallow me with his kisses.

I felt the slightest qualm of insecurity as he came into me. I was
unsure if he was moved by desire or by something else. I was not sure
what. Duty? Will? A sense of doing it for me because I wanted it, not
because he was driven to it by desire for me?

Feeling that way, it was perhaps unwise that I moved in with him. But
I did. I moved into his place and what I began to learn was what it
meant to be obedient.

I had once been easy-going, I thought, even if that thought would seem
ridiculous to anyone who had seen me before I became his. Before,
then, I did not have to worry about what someone thought of me. I
could block that out entirely.

But now what I was learning to feel as a constant feeling was the
feeling of feeling insecure, of always being afraid that I was doing,
had done, or would do something displeasing.

There was a definite hierarchy. He was above me; I was below him. It
was what we both wanted.

It was what we both wanted?

It was what we both wanted.

I had never been in a relationship where the role of obedience was so
clearly spelled out.

But the problem of obedience is implicit in every relationship, and
the cause of rancor and resentment in many. Both partners demand the
obedience of the other. The word, however, never enters their
conversation or even their thoughts. Each fight they have is the
result of one of them feeling hurt when the other one does not listen
to him and do as he says, that is, obey him as he wants to be obeyed.

It is the case among people in heterosexual relationships, too.

I don't ask much of you, many years ago I heard a mother on the
street, pushing a stroller, cry at her five year-old, just that you
obey me.

Daniel explained it to me. Without a regulated obedience freely given
by one partner to the will of the other so that there is one will
between the two of them, the dominant will; without one partner being
entirely in willing, even ecstatic submission to the will of the
other; and without the other partner willing and wanting to be master
and determiner, relationships are impossible.

I want to be in a relationship with you, Daniel said, looking into my
eyes as he caressed my head. Do you understand what that means?

I do, I said.

That you will submit, willingly, knowing it is what you want to do.

I will, I said.


Daniel smiled a slightly sardonic smile as he put his arm around my
shoulders and led me to a man standing by a large window overlooking
the Planetarium. He held a glass of scotch from which he took sporadic
swallows and held forth to a group of younger, junior executive types.

I have to introduce you to someone, Daniel said.

I had never seen him like that, doing something he was reluctant to do.

Eliot Freemont was formidable. He had an overweening sense of
self-appreciation.

I shook his hand when Daniel introduced me.

You've deserted me for this raw youth? he said to Daniel with a wink.

You could have done worse.

I could not have done better, Daniel said.

Freemont never yielded.

You have always underestimated yourself, he said.

A handsome woman, her black hair cut short like a man's, wearing an
ivory-colored silk shirt and a short black leather skirt that showed
most of her long and strong legs, glinting in the sheen of her
invisible stockings, which had a great black seam running from the
heel of her open-toed, cross strap, high-heels up the back of her legs
to disappear insid the  hidden area underneath her skirt approached.
She was holding a flute of champagne and sensed something
uncomfortable was happening, but knew nothing more; say, what it might
have been about.

She put her arm protectively round Daniel and drew him away from
Freemont and from me, too.

Daniel resisted. His body stiffened. He shook his head and repeatedly
said no. But she thought he was saying no in muttering anger at
something she was unaware of between him and Freemont. She wanted to
get him away from there, to prevent him from getting into an open
conflict with Freemont.  She pulled at him. He was torn away from me
just when he knew he had to be near me. He was pierced by the sense
that he was betraying me. It would look like he was deliberately
sacrificing me to Freemont to further his own interests by leaving me
alone.

Daniel what is the matter? Martha said.

It's nothing, he said, trying to shake her.

Then he added, knowing she was his friend, that he had to get me away
from Freemont.

Oh, she said, slyly, he's...

He's someone very dear to me who needs careful tending.

Then why did you introduce him to Freemont in the first place?

Because I'm stupid. But it does not matter now. What matters is that I
have to get him out of it now.

It can't look like that, she said.

Don't worry, she said. It does not look like betrayal is in your
friend's nature. Leave them alone. What happens has to happen. Don't
make it bigger than it is, she said and smiled slyly at her own joke.
Dance with me, she said, and pulled him into a dance when the sound
system began the throbbing seduction of the pounding beat of Martha
and the Vandellas singing Dancing in the Street.

Meanwhile Freemont was acting like a fool in front of me, but I
realized without knowing exactly how, that he was important. I wished
Daniel had told me more, but I knew something was expected of me, and
I imagined that Daniel had arranged this meeting as a test whereby he
was putting himself at considerable risk, as well as me, depending on
how I handled myself now, and, more important than that, how I handled
Freemont.

I did not know what he was talking about but Freemont went on about
his role in negotiations to develop the new complex of high rises by
the river.

Is it in yours? he said. I did not know what he was referring to.

What? I said.

I could not tell if his wink was deliberate or an involuntary
twitching of his eye.

I'm not following, I said.

And I was sure you were expert at it.

At what? I said, truly mystified.

Following, he said.

I said nothing, trying to figure out my next move, and knowing that
the size of his ego would cause him to understand silence as
attention.

Why don't you come over to my place afterwards, by yourself? he said.


He's overbearing and sinister, I said to Daniel hearing in my voice
the remnant of the reproach that I would not permit myself to direct
at him. We walked south on Fifth Avenue before we hailed a cab
downtown. We passed windows filled with cozy parlors and iced-over
ponds upon whose glassy surfaces lovely figurines of happy skaters
danced.

He's a dangerous person, Daniel said, and I hate myself for having fed
his vanity and leaving you with him.

I'm not sure his vanity was exactly fed, I said. But why is he important?

He can make certain that you never design a building, large or small,
public or private, in the entire state of New York, in Connecticut,
and in Massachusetts.

He's that powerful?

 He's that powerful.

So you've got to be careful.

You've got to be careful.

I was.

You were?

Yeah, tonight. He asked me for my cell number.

What for?

Daniel knew it was a stupid question and he did not resent the look I
gave him letting him know it was.

Because I would not go home with him, I said.

He asked you to go home with him?

You did not know he would? I tried to say it in as neutral a way as possible.

Now that you say it, yes; I'm sorry.

He said I would make a good bitch.

The bastard.

I was good.

Daniel looked at me without saying anything.

 I said that I'd be happy to see him when I was with you, but
otherwise it was impossible. I was monogamous.

We can have dinner some night, the three of us, he said.

Talk to Daniel, I said.

He's clever, Daniel said

Was I ok? I asked.

You were terrific, Daniel said.

No, I said. I was only truthful. I belong to you.


When we got home, I bathed him and myself.

Around the bed I set a circle of candelabras and lighted us with flame.

Lie down, I said.

After he had, I licked every inch of his body until my tongue brushed
his lips and parted them and I delivered myself to the inside of his
mouth and became the breath he breathed.

I backed up and touched his cheeks with the palms of my hands and
looked without anxiety into his eyes. I was slow, like the lapping
water that touches the shore, that breaks into lace, and is absorbed
by the first inches of the shore where the ocean gives way to the
earth.

He returned my gaze with the same intensity and tenderness.

Our faces glowed with gladness.

We kissed and I was glad at everything he did.

I'd rather we did not see him, I said the next morning between sips of
strong, sweet, hot coffee.

What do you intend to do now? he said.

I knew he was taking the conversation back to the requirement that I
do something now that
I was neither proofreading nor spending my time courting frustration
by trying to live in a fairy tale.

[When you write, please put story name in subject slot. thanks.]