Free Imaginary Toys by Julian Mitchell

mean I haven’t slept with all that number of people in my life, in fact I’ve probably slept with less than most (what is the average, anyway?) but I have learned from those privileged few a great deal about them, and, indeed, a quite surprising amount about myself, too.
    Well, anyway, what I’m saying is that the close attention I paid to what Elaine was saying wasn’t simply that of a smutty-minded schoolboy, and, in any case, you would have had to have admitted that what she was saying was really pretty interesting in itself. I must admit that I looked up to see if there was anyone within earshot, but there wasn’t, so I lay down again and listened.
    ‘I don’t do anything at all, you know,’ she was saying. ‘I just lie there, like a lump of flesh, watching him. At least it must look like that to an observer. Not that we’ve ever had one, so far as we know. I suppose Jack can feel what’s going on inside me, but I hardly move a muscle to help. I had no idea sex was going to be like that. I thought it would be all puffing and panting and lunging and things. But goodness … You’d never think it of Jack. His fingers are ever so sensitive. He just strokes and strokes, until I’m not me any more, at least my body isn’t mine any more, it’s all his. And at first I can’t bear it, I feel that he’s taking something away from me, something that’s mine and mine alone, that no one should even know exists, but quite soon that goes, I don’t think anything at all, anything, I’m gone, I mean it’s gone, my body, into some other world where it does belong to him, and to him only, and I have no say in the matter at all. And I feel terribly glad that I don’t have to worry about it any more, because it’s in the most careful hands, which will guard it unto death, as we Christians say. There’s a marvellous bit in the marriage service somewhere. “With my body I thee worship.” I think that’s ever so right, and good. And I have to let go of my body and give it up before I can worship him with it. And then I’m not sure what happens exactly, because my mind seems to go away too, to join the body, and somewhere around there his body joins us, and that’s when everything becomes impossible to describe. I’ve never read a good description of sex, have you? I mean the last part? I don’t think you can describe the true thing. One simply isn’t thinking, is one? It doesn’t happen in words at all, it happens in feelings, and one can’t even rememberafterwards what the feelings were like. I just know afterwards that it was ever so marvellous. It’s as though the joy can only exist for a limited amount of time, and after that it fades away even from memory. I can recollect having a marvellous feeling, and knowing I was having it. But I never can remember what the feeling was like. Perhaps that’s just a female way of seeing it, I don’t know. Women get terribly carried away, you know. I just get lost, and when I’m back to earth again, everything’s over. But that’s a wonderful feeling, too, after it’s over. If I had to choose, and it’s silly even to try to, but if I had to, I’d choose the moment when I stop resisting, which is the best before the thing itself, and the relaxation afterwards , the … there must be a word for it. But I don’t think about all this at the time, I just know I’m there with him, and it’s the most wonderful place in the world, and nothing can ever go wrong, because we’ve been together like that, and we will again. And we’ve made love, and making love is something terribly important and good. And——’
    She sighed and didn’t go on.
    Well, I didn’t quite know what to say to all that, because I wasn’t a woman, and it struck me as terribly interesting to hear a woman’s point of view, and, anyway, I’d never slept with Margaret, and I hadn’t wanted, while I was in love with her, to sleep with anyone else, fool that I was, and so I was a bit out of