There's a heavy rain outside. Dark skies, lightning, rain sweeping hard across the pool and the roofs. I can always feel it when the weather shifts. My sinuses are throbbing right now. I'd been out on the patio reading and smoking Parliaments. The Parliaments were a kind of homage to Alessandra at bel_ebat. Alessandra was up 'til dawn this morning doing lines of coke by a swimming pool and smoking Parliaments and drinking Tanqueray-and-tonic with a clutch of undergraduate boys. I really should know better than to smoke during weather like this. I need to have my sinuses bored out. Or cauterised.

There's no light on across the street at Nr. 937. The blonde girl has likely gone away for the long weekend. She'll be in a hotel room or a beach condo with clients or her sugar daddy. She'll be spending lots of bikini time as a Display Item. Ms. Chang will be suntanning topless on a sailboat in the Keys--- another Display Item, even though she is married.

I don't have to go to the office tomorrow. I'll sleep late and try to spend the day reading. By the pool, maybe--- I do need a tan. I'm olive-complected. I do manage to always look better with a tan. I did buy steaks this afternoon. I'll do a couple of steaks and drink Tanqueray-and-tonic in honour of Alessandra at bel_ebat.

Martin Amis once quoted a poem of Philip Larkin's, a poem called "High Windows". I read it over today and felt uncomfortably able to identify:

When I see a couple of kids
And guess he's fucking her and she's
Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm,
I know this is paradise

Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives—
Bonds and gestures pushed to one side
Like an outdated combine harvester,
And everyone young going down the long slide

To happiness, endlessly. I wonder if
Anyone looked at me, forty years back,
And thought, That'll be the life;
No God any more, or sweating in the dark

About hell and that, or having to hide
What you think of the priest. He
And his lot will all go down the long slide
Like free bloody birds. And immediately

Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:
The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.

That I can identify with the poem makes me angry and sad and empty.

I really do want to have Alessandra at bel_ebat and Ginny at ginny_mccoo and Lissy at emigree read Fernanda Eberstadt's "Low Tide" and write me about it. I'd like to hear about it from Delighted and CloverSt at Diaryland, too. It's important to me that I have girls talk to me about books. I really need to have Ms. Chang at Selena at AtWoWayDream tell me about their own take on "Low Tide", too. And I want to hear their views in detail about Samantha Dunn's "Failing Paris", too.

I'm following along at stelladellasera as Stella recounts the s/m ritual she and her Island girls enacted with Stella's younger brother and his gay lover. It's a lovely and wicked story. Stella writes erotica well, and of course I love the transgressive part of it all, the whole Incestuous Sibling idea. Her take on that idea is vur' different from either Katy V. in San Antonio or Ginny at ginny_mccoo...or from Ms. Chang.

[Lexie always believed that Stella was merely some male masturbating at a laptop, believed that Stella and Caitlin at kissmecaitlin were creations of one male. All I can say is that on some concrete level, the IP addresses are vur' different. And more importantly--- Stella and Caitlin have been supportive and kind and fun. They've offered me good advice, and Stella has been vur' kind to the most-pettable little K-dot at citydress as well. I'll just say that Stella and Caitlin have been good friends to me, and that alone matters. I believe in them, believe in the friendship they've offered me.]

Stella to some degree sees the Incestuous Sibling idea as part of teaching and nurturing--- and as sharing a polyamorous and s/m and polymorphous-perverse life. The vur' lovely kirstys_girl and I did talk about that. Stella found safety and love in submission, in consensual slavery to her Lucia. Stella offered herself to the girl she'd loved since grade school and found a place where she could be loved. Stella, I think, sees trangression and s/m as a kind of nurturing. And that includes incestuous games with her brother and his boyfriend. Katy V. and Ms. Chang and Ginny at ginny_mccoo all look on the Incestuous Sibling image as being deliciously wicked and as a way to be free to explore sexuality and strike a Sebastian-and-Julia kind of pose as well. Lissy at emigree liked the image for the same reason: being ravished and trained by an imaginary Older Brother there at the start of her teens would give her an opportunity (or excuse) to be deliciously slutty and try everything. After all--- having an Imaginary Older Brother who'd force them into sluthood all through junior high and high school is a perfect explanation for being a sexual adventuress. Ms. Chang described the Incestuous Sibling fantasy the same way--- a way to be a high school slut and come home to her Imaginary Older Brother and report everything. Ms. Chang may have been molested by a real older brother; she's seen a therapist about that. But her Imaginary Older Brother is always literary and wickedly clever--- like Ginny's or Lissy's ---and devotes himself not just to violating her, but to molding her into something elegantly decadent and wicked. Ginny once wrote an Imaginary Love Letter to her Imaginary Incestuous Older Sibling, writing him on her twenty-first birthday--- the tenth anniversary of him first violating her ---and telling him that, along with the eating disorder and the two abortions, he'd given her a whole world of books and dreams and romance... Katy V. always imagined having a secret incestuous affair up through college and then running off with her Imaginary Older Sibling to pretend to be a married couple (same last name, after all) and having a young-married-professionals life. One day I will get Stella to analyse Ginny's and Lissy's and Katy V.'s own Incestuous Sibling dreams...

Stella's rituals with her s/m Island girls are vur' different from what I'd create. My own version of s/m ritual is never really about flesh, and never really about submission. They're about art and imagery and visions of style. I told a girl not long ago that if you don't look good at what you're doing, you shouldn't be doing it. I've believed that all my life. Whatever you're doing is never as important in and of itself as how it would look on film or on a page. I'll say it again: I don't take physical pleasure in anything, really. Sex to me has never been about physical sensation. It's always and ever been about Stories--- about striking a particular pose, about how something can be made into a Story. That's why ritual is important. Let's quote Yeats, a passage that I'm sure Caitlin at kissmecaitlin knows:

How but in custom and ceremony
Are innocence and beauty born?

I found that quote the other day in John Leonard's "Private Lives in the Imperial City". That's another book I wish I could get lovely readers and correspondents to track down and devour.

The Small Pika called the other night to tell me that she'd been reading a book I'd once sent her--- an old paperback copy of Eco's "Name of the Rose" ---and found something wonderful. There wedged between two pages of "Name of the Rose" she found a Continental boarding pass in my name for a flight to Pittsburgh. That flight must have been...twelve years ago. At least twelve years ago. I could still fly in those days. I hadn't become phobic about flying yet. I still had flights to Turkey and Croatia in my future. I told the Small Pika that Pittsburgh airport in those days had a Starbucks--- the vur' first one I'd ever been in.

It does make me sad that I'll never get to hear from Lissy at emigree about the details of her summer. She wrote at her secret diary of telling her soldier-lover of her dreams of sex at Vantaa Airport and of her masturbatory games on subways and trains. Details matter. Stories matter. But I'll never get to hear them. And I'll never get to hear her account of how she dealt with the logistics of going off for a romantic week with her soldier-lover, or of how she explained a boy in her bed at home. Ginny at ginny_mccoo wrote me early in the year to say that her apartment bed at grad school was still unchristened, even for phonesex. I have to ask her if that's still true. My own flat remains unchristened, and there's no chance it ever will be. I can't afford the services of the blonde girl across the street, and I'm no longer valued as a voice on the aether.

It does occur to me that for most of my life I've dated girls younger than I am. That's not invariable. When I was nineteen, there was an affair with a girl of thirty or so--- thirty or so and married. I liked that a lot. It felt brilliantly wicked. And there were a few girls along the way who were exactly my own age. But since...well, at least since I first went to grad school, the girls I fancied were younger. And of course it's hard now for any girl not to be younger than I am. I'm still younger than most non-sedimentary rocks, but I am older than most trees, and certainly older than any girl I'm likely to find attractive. The thing that occurs to me right now is that so many younger girls--- even vur' much younger girls ---who've become involved with me quite quickly took me in hand. Lacey went from violated kilt-wearing schoolgirl to chatelaine at my house vur' quickly. She might be blindfolded and tied with silk and violated with ice cubes or a pistol barrel, but there was never any doubt that she was Official Hostess for me. And if I did enforce a strict all-in-black, no underwear dress code for her, she never had a problem marching me into stores and explaining that her Older Lover needed a new blazer or new shirts. Other girls have done that, too--- taken charge of my life in any place outside the bedroom or the classroom. Multivitamins, new decor, better outfits, a better diet--- girls have looked up from being tied to the bed and whipped or covered in drops of candle wax to remind me of all that.

Lacey at sixteen or seventeen was exactly the height and weight Cynthia Gralla specifies for her heroine in "The Floating World" when Liza is abandoning herself to anorexia while studying dance in Tokyo. Lacey, though, would sit with me at Mongolian barbecue and match me bowl for bowl and explain that, alas, she didn't have an eating disorder, she was just tall and gaunt. Well--- she had stark and kissable hipbones and collarbones and the most perfect deadpan expression and a wicked, wicked wit. Lacey would keep up with me at Chinese buffets or steakhouses and stay deliciously tall and angular. She'd trace a finger over my lips--- Mongolian barbecue mixed with her own juices ---and tell me just to pretend that she was starved...and tell me to take her off to somewhere close and risky for impromptu sex. Lacey was an inch or so taller than I am--- all in black, all angles and long bare legs. I should've married her when she was twenty or twenty-one. Ms. Chang got married at twenty to a graphic designer ex-surfer dude who was thirty-eight. I have a good record on girls saying yes when I've asked them to marry me--- the Lost Liz Farrell and the Evil Dana Lynn both said yes ---but no one has ever stayed long enough to go through with it. No one is likely ever to imagine me as worth marrying or living with. I wasn't valuable enough in better days to be worth marrying, and God knows I'm worth less now.

Lissy at emigree calls her soldier-lover her Fox. I can't recall any girl ever giving me a name like that. The Evil Dana Lynn called me her E (fiance having only one E), and the Lost Liz Farrell called me Dear. All the other girls I can remember out of my Past called me...well...by my last name. Lacey once in a while called me Eduardo-kun, but most of the time it was De Guzman-san. All the others have done the same: De Guzman-san, or Doctor de Guzman. More girls have called me by my academic title than by any endearment--- even during sex.

I've had animal ("aminul", the little K-dot would say) avatars. I've seen myself as a Small Mongolian Pony ("Good pony," Lacey would say, petting my forehead) or as a Small, Long-Eared Desert Hedgehog. Or as a raven--- a raven, of course, since I can be vur' like a writing desk (a riddle that maybe only DRL and the K-dot remember). I've thought of Little Ellen as the Small Pika, and thought of the K-dot as a Small Sea Otter or a Small Chipster-Munk. Lissy calls her soldier-lover her Fox. (The K-dot and I used to think of Eva-Grace as a Little Arctic Fox Cub; there was even a song for it) No girl has ever given me a name based on a totem animal. No girl has ever found me worth a pet name or endearments.

Who is Keith Gessen, and why do the vile commenters at Gawker.com hate him?

Reading Lissy's secret diary, reading her account of making love in a Montauk hotel room, I found myself left increasingly empty and gloomy not by accounts of the sex (envy, not jealousy) but by the dialogue. I've forgotten how to talk to girls across a table, and I have no idea at all what to say in bed to a girl. I've forgotten what lovers say to one another. (Quick--- a line from an '80s song: "...let's talk like lovers do...": can anyone identify it?) I need a girl who can remind me of those things, who can talk with me across hotel room sheets about love and desire and closeness. There are times when nothing is as important as telling a girl--- even one blindfolded and with wrists bound with silk ---that she's beautiful and desired and loved.

The song--- the line comes (I think) from Eurythmics' "Here Comes the Rain Again"...

I treasure the proofs of love and value. I do need that--- to know that I'm worth conversations in shadow across crisp fresh sheets. An image from "Lost Girls and Love Hotels", an image that I hope Ginny at ginny_mccoo liked: the heroine sitting cross-legged and naked with a cigarette on the bed in a Tokyo love hotel, looking over her glasses at her latest Japanese lover. Lithe wicked lovely girls naked on crisp sheets--- I've always liked that image. The glasses make it seriously hot. No girl, though, is likely to sit like that for me and talk about books and desire again. No girl finds me worth endearments or a pet name. And no girl finds me worth whispering to in the dark.

Paint what you know, Beth Orton sings, not what you see: hope blinds reason, thankfully... I'm in love with the song. Major crush on Beth Orton, of course: but in love with the song. I'm listening to Delerium there behind me. But it's Beth Orton that I'm hearing in my head over the sound of the rain.

Exiles feed on bitter dreams of hope: Aegisthos says that in Aeschylus' "Agamemnon". I've been repeating that line in my head since I was seventeen. Exiles feed on bitter dreams of hope. I still have those dreams. I dream of being valued, and of hearing endearments across a table or (better) across a bed. I still hope that one day I'll hear voices again on the aether, telling me that I'm desired and valued. No girl caresses herself in train compartments for me, no girl thinks I'm worth a romantic vacation or whispers in shadow. I have Tanqueray and tonic--- though Alessandra has always known how to get cocaine, and I lost that skill when my clubland days ended. I can sit here and drink and read. That's what I do, these days. No high windows--- though I do have the upstairs patio to look down from.