cunnilingus

We raise a toast at O's 30th birthday. X says, "If you touch glasses without eye contact, it's seven years of bad sex." I say, "That explains the first seven years," but nobody hears me, and we drink.

On the drive there, H has occasion to say, "I love lesbians." He declares, to the other dyke in the car, his happiness at finding a drinking buddy who is both highly tolerant of alcohol and a lesbian.

The drinking buddies get into a friendly football screaming match in the long ride home from Santa Cruz. "Eli Manning only had twelve interceptions last year!" "Yeah, but four were in the same game! And I know that because he fucked up my stupid fantasy football season!" V is nervously negotiating the mountains' curves, and asks me to break up the noisy fight. I say, "Let's go back to talking about sex!", to no avail. I shout, "Sex! Sex! Sex!" again and again, as they shout, "Walter Payton was not Peyton Manning's father!" and "The Giants' Superbowl was a fluke!" Finally, I scream, "DRIPPING VULVAS!!!" There is a moment of silence in the car. "Oh wait," says H, "Dripping vulvas?"

I find myself later giving unsolicited cunnilingus advice to a friend. We call it "skeet shooting," so that other patrons in the make-your-own-salad restaurant will not have to suffer our foolishness. I draw a pomegranate and a mouth, and say things like, "This is soft tissue; and this is also soft tissue," and draw arrows connecting various parts of the mouth with various parts of the pomegranate. I realize I have delivered very poor advice when my friend points to my friend's nose and says, "So you're saying I should use . . . ?"

My friend, let me try this again. Cunnilingus is not a two-dimensional pomegranate. Cunnilingus is a tennis match. But you do not play against your partner; you play with your partner. Both of you are on one side of the court, the illuminated side. The other side is shrouded in shadow. Your partner feeds you balls, and you serve them as quickly as you can to the dark side. Sometimes you foul. Sometimes you ace. The balls go unreturned into the void. You do this until your rotator cuff is sore, and you are coming to the end of your ball bucket, and you think it is all for naught, when suddenly -- after a long, expectant pause -- the dozens of balls you have successfully served over the net are simultaneously launched back at the two of you like bright green buckshot -- there's some pun about muzzle velocity here -- and it is all you and your partner can do to plant the racket in the clay and huddle like a pair of frightened hoplites behind your shield until the barrage of neon balls is over. Then you embrace and sometimes cry, and your vision is filled with Vladimir Putin's grinning head against raw meat.

S says, "You make yourself seem like you're so liberated but actually you're the biggest prude." This is something of a disappointment to S, who believes my next creative project should be a lesbian coming of age memoir plus cunnilingus tips.

I say, "You're right, I can only talk about sex in euphemism and metaphor." Under my breath, unheard by the toasting celebrants. As visions of Vladimir Putin. As Rafael and Roger versus the dark half of the court. Imagine it: Nadal and Federer in a sweaty post-coital hug, their little white shorts riding up the damp rondures of their young buttocks, Nadal saying in his Majorcan mumble, "Baby, where'd you learn to . . .

Okay, I had an entire dialogue written out there, but then I tapped the backspace button a hundred times. I cannot bring myself to leave it in this post. You will have to supply the rest of that erotic fiction for yourself, as if you haven't already.

Meanwhile, I am having one of those woman days where you look down in the toilet and you think, "Who upended a jar of grape jelly in there?"