Free Slave Lover by Marco Vassi Page B

painfully bright in her uniqueness and each love was the birth of a new reality. And while he understood, conceptually, that everyone who loves feels the same, yet his heart kept whispering that this was the first time in the history of the world that precisely such a love had been known. Then there had come the so-called sexual revolution, when one did not speak of a woman but of a cunt, and love was considered an antiquated euphemism for fucking. Chet had fucked his brains out, almost literally, until he had attained the ideal of the brief epoch that defined the late 1960s: he was no longer able to tell one woman from another. When he met Constance, he was trying to recapture the earlier innocence, knowing that that was impossible.
    “Yet,” he had reasoned, “if I live according to the way I used to feel, perhaps I will get some of my belief back.”
    It hadn’t occurred to him that Constance had a parallel evolution. And as he looked down at the picture of her on her dresser, he wondered if he really knew her at all.
    “What is it?” he thought, “three years? How little time that is in relation to one’s entire life. It’s less than a tenth for me. When I match her against my parents, my old friends, ex-lovers that I still maintain a relationship with; when I match her against myself, then she’s practically a stranger. I’ve met a handful of her friends. I don’t know her former lovers. I’ve never seen her parents. I know nothing of her childhood except a few superficial facts.”
    Chet was forced by her disappearance to look with unusually honest examination into just what it was that existed between the two of them. And it dawned on him that he was not relating so much to her as to his relationship to her. That is, he was involved more in the structure of what they did together than in her herself and in herself. There had been flashes from time to time when he was able to distance himself and view her as though she were a stranger, but even that was a theatrical gimmick and partook more of the superstructure than of the actual contact.
    Ultimately, he found, that sex with her had ceased to be an erotic act as such, for it lost the necessary tension of surrender to the forbidden. In return for the loss of the erotic mood, he received good, healthy, pleasurable fucking. It was obvious that eroticism was an ego function, having to do with conquest, mastery, show, and questions of curiosity and novelty. A cunt is a cunt but to slip one’s fingers into a cunt one has not known before contains a basic appeal that no amount of pious intentions regarding the bond with one’s beloved can obviate.
    Yet, she represented certain values that he felt he had to incorporate, although even there it was uncertain as to whether they were nothing more than reflections of an essential insecurity concerning his vision of existence. He was, in fact, afraid to come to a conclusion concerning the nature of things for that would have implied a decision about how he would live his life, the subsequent betrayal of which would have rendered him radically impotent. It was better to pretend not to know, and accept the essential paradox of relationship which makes us progressively uninteresting to one another the more real we become. For, beyond illusion, which is distance, only self-reflective unity exists. He was faced with the conflict between the comforts of eternity and the poignant beauty of mortality.
    He tidied up the apartment, put out the lights, and locked the place behind him as he left. Each phase of his departure was etched in hyperrealistic awareness, for the ritual was suffused with a searing sense of finality. Perhaps Constance was dead. He realized that he was not overly upset at the idea. He only felt the turmoil of his emotions when he thought on how she might have died.
    “Or she might be installed in a harem somewhere,” he said to himself and found himself smiling at the image of Constance dressed as Lana