#141 – HER BREATH

And there is rolling thunder somewhere in the background of my mind, this time like in those fake soft core scenes where the camera pans up to the sky, but this is not a fake movie scene and the camera stays right here.

Missionary position sex in the night, and deep, unworried sleep, and sex again with Gillian on top in the morning. And we stay in bed. This young woman, real but like a dream from lonely times, her blonde hair hanging down tickling me. She takes my nearly bursting penis in her mouth. And as I am about to come again, draws back, leaving my penis wet, then comes down again, and gently blows on it.

We go out to the Aqua Mustang and drive again, aimlessly it seems. She is talking again. Telling me she was this eager young girl, who by the time she was 14 was hanging out at the Bethesda Fountain where she picked up boys to fuck. Later she is a Buddhist, and a well-known Tibetan monk, a lionized popularizer in the West of magic Buddhist ways, corners her and fucks her hard – not unlike what some of her mother’s friends, at her mother’s instigation, had done when she was growing up in that apartment that smelled of her mother’s serial masturbation. But this does not mean, she saying that she is against all Buddhist holy men.

We decide to go out of the country, drive into Canada again. The houses across the border on this day look particular eccentric, with inland widow’s walks or stained glass or colored tile, and they are set at angles that have nothing to do with the landscape. We stop at a dilapidated Canadian roadside restaurant where everyone is speaking French. A waitress at our table is trying to tell us something and neither of us understands her though I have a little French, mostly from Haiti and Africa, and Gillian a little more. The waitress motions that we should follow her, and she leads us to the Mustang and points to a puddle of fuel that has leaked from the gas tank.

We fill the tank at the next station, and then as the guage goes down, we stop for more gas to keep the needle up. The next morning we begin our most leisurely day. After sex she takes a bath in the old enameled iron tub that is on legs. The little bathroom becomes steamy and she is ripe and rosy. Don’t look at me, she says. I am getting too fat. But I look at her and she is just right.

We drive to a garage in Vergennes, leave the car a couple of hours, since they cannot get to it immediately. After lunch we come back and are told there is bad news. The leak is so big that those substances meant to plug it will not work. I will need a new gas tank. And it has to be sent for and will not arrive for several days.

I think that she is concerned about her sidewalk business, left in the hands of an undocumented Irishman. But before I ask, she says “It's fine with me if we stay here till the gas tank arrives.”

We still use the car for short laps, frequently adding more gas. We take it to Vergennes, where we buy balloons.