Free The Merry Month of May by James Jones

causing her to have pleasure. Carry it on all the way to where she comes and you ceased even to be an object. Because in the midst of her come nothing exists except herself and what she’s feeling. So that, through her, what you’ve done is “stimulate” yourself right out of existence. What you’ve really been doing is to be present at and assist in your own cuckolding. In reality— . . . you have been cuckolding yourself! . . . Man, we’re masochists, man! he cried at me, his eyes jewelly in the light. All us cunt-lovers!
    I think he was a little drunk by then. Anyway, it was certainly a new idea to me, and the logic seemed impeccable. I mainly kept my eyes down and nodded, pretending to peer reflectively into my by-now empty glass, in order to avoid being further embarrassed by exposing the embarrassment I already felt. At one point once, I thought fleetingly of asking to have my glass refilled. But before I could even do it, Harry had leaned forward with the bottle in his hand and poured whisky in the glass, his jaw continuing to wag and rotate at me, without even slowing.
    I got very drunk. Things began to come and go in what film people call fast dissolves, and then would suddenly arrest themselves in those sudden stop-shots in which everything freezes and the man with the pointing finger remains fixed, frozen, in front of you for what seems an inordinate length of time. I began to see things in splintered images as if the mirror glass had broken; and I would find myself present at the beginning of something only to disappear and find myself, next, far into the middle part of something else without having been present at the ending of the first or the beginning of the second. So I am somewhat vague about the rest of what transpired.
    I remember Harry talking about his pornography collection, which is famous in the American colony in Paris, and saying he would get some of it out to prove some point. Next I was sitting forward in my chair with my knees together, poring through a whole flock of precisely focused, glossy finish photographs in series of fives in my lap, all of which Harry apparently had said he’d bought in London, I remembered vaguely. Beside me on the low Louis Treize table was an even greater flock of them which I apparently had already been through; and beside these was a stack of Olympia Press and Ophelia Press books I must have looked at too. All of this is crystal clear. The photos were of varied subjects, but most of them were of two women making love in various ways. Some of them were of white girls committing fellatio upon young Negro males. The girls changed from series to series.
    “That’s the trend it’s taking,” Harry was saying beside me from over my shoulder. “More and more. Lesbianism. Or not even true lesbianism. Just two women, two normal women, making love together. I don’t know why it turns me on so, but it does.”
    Then I disappeared again. When I returned, Harry was locking up the pornography collection in its glass-doored shelves. I was aware dimly that he had been talking about “his Fantasy”. He himself had capitalized the word with his voice, and it had something to do with making love with two women at the same time, instead of the normal, usual one.
    “You wouldn’t believe it,” he growled over his shoulder, as he turned the key on the last great batch of the pornography. “But it’s the God’s truth.” Apparently he had just been talking about something else, too. “If I didn’t lock them up, they’d disappear in a minute. That’s why I had the doors put on. Why, I’ve had producers and directors staying up here working on a script with me, big important men I mean, and making plenty of their own money. Well, by God, after they’d leave, I’d find one or two of my choicest items missing. Stolen.” He put the keys in his jacket pocket protectively. They were on a different ring from his other keys. All of this was crystal clear, too. “I