Literary erotica...
"The Male Exultation of Penetrating the Substance," a sex story by Palombe Oursin
A Soft Bed by Eric K. Wallis - available at ObsessionArt.comAt 7:30 on the night before, the night before Thanksgiving I tacked my review up on the corkboard inside the bakery right beside the bread schedule. The wooden tables reflected the warmth shooting across the room from the huge oven. Tubs of whole wheat starter were open and nearing the rim of their capacity. For the bakery crew I hoped the words of recognition would serve as a motivator to bake the 92 pounds of Ciabatta, 42 boules of sourdough, 69 spelt, 200 dozen French rolls, rustic loaves, 7-grain, semolina, a few challah for good measure and assorted batards.
The review was my price of admission.
“Squirreled away in a brick building, behind a purple door the rising scent of crisping crusts will make everything about you rise as well! You’ll be wild with desire. Crack the door to hear conversations about poolish, levain, oven spring, and how many small olives to weigh out. These hard-workers are up at 4 am and do cross-training in the French, Italian, and German language of love: bread. The hallmark of a great loaf is tough to come by in the humid south: the crust. Their crusts never disappoint. Plan a rustique picnique around these hard slants of sweet sourness: authentic sourdough and French baguettes, boules of olive and rosemary, braided challah full of silky golden raisins and farm eggs, Ciabatta with enough airy holes to hide a salami, and a Volkornbrot sturdy enough to scale the Matterhorn.”
I hung up my brown sweater and tied on an apron; stood at the kneading table. I took three ropes of challah from the pile of twisted coils. The dough was so alive, as Jean-Louis would say, that the snakes appeared to be growing before my eyes, puffy and engorged. Golden raisins were embedded in the yolk dough much like the chunks of gravel that stuck in my bloody knee when I fell as a little girl roller-skating down the middle of my street. And the feeling was the same, watching the huckster’s truck turn the corner of Fourth Street in slow motion, spilling strawberries, sweet fruits of pleasure, hoping it would stop before it got to me in the middle of the street, where I shouldn’t be.
Only it was this bread bakery I was skating around and through, and I shouldn’t be here either. Not the way I felt about Jean-Louis and bread. I thought I could make the ends of my challah and life meet. It was one thing to write a review, but how could I ever support myself on eight-dollars-an-hour?
It was near 4:30 a.m. that the two of them, Joy and Jean-Louis, and the one of me lay sprawled out on the square feather bed up the small stairs from the bakery in the brick building of the purple doors. We were following the bread to take a three hour rest. I hoped bread would give us more pause than rest.
But exhaustion had been kneaded into us and after 10 of the 24 scheduled hours of non-stop baking there seemed like little chance of learning anything more about Jean-Louis than how he sleeps. My notes and pen were beside me, as well as the bread man.
Muffled by the sheets and baby blue cashmere blankets, I felt a subterranean spirit of rising, from the sour dough starter. The levain had followed us upstairs and penetrated our hair and pores, transformed cells of our brains into a honeycomb of pure sex, thus depleting any and all desire to return to the world as I had known it. These were the hours before oven spring. The flour, rice and wheat, that covered us lent a smoky ambiance that I would find hard, for personal reasons, to work into my cover story about the behind the scene scenes in a bakery the night before a holiday.
“So, batard is one letter away from bastard. And your specialty.” I combed the hair out of his eyes.
“I’m too tired to talk about fucking batard’s or bastards.” He took my pen out of my hand and threw it across the room. It hit the window and landed in a wire wastebasket. Clearly Jean-Louis was cranky and that was not usual. It was his hallmark of attraction, at least for me. He wasn’t serious. Just insistent and playful.
“Poor bread man, too tired to talk, oui?”
Joy rolled away, the star quilt she brought with her slumped against the bed’s wrought iron legs as she got up and headed towards the bathroom, her thick glasses askew on the top of her dishwater blonde head. She closed the door about half way. The silver handle of the door was loose and hung there limply. She lowered the toilet seat and sat down. It was comforting to hear her trickling release across the silence. I felt calmed and in the good company of another woman. But it was odd too as if it didn’t matter if Joy was a woman or a man. She was a being who enjoyed bread and bicycles and had been harshly ridiculed for not being a good shaper of baguettes, despite her clay sculptures that decorated the bakery. From what I had observed, I thought she was nervous and had a crush on Jean-Louis. Or she enjoyed women, or both. Who knows? I didn’t want to ask for verification I just wanted to observe this smoky film noir existence and see what was happening. I told myself I didn’t have to participate. I would be happy to watch them.
But unless you’ve done it yourself, the final shaping of a baguette, you have no idea that something so beautiful on the table goes through such torture to get there. There is a folding in on itself and a releasing of air that precedes the building of tension that is the trademark of a well-formed baguette. Jean-Louis can run a finger over a baguette nestled in the couche and know who on his team was responsible. The bread man was the king of palpable tension. He had to know how I felt.
The wood planked walls in the big room with the bed were a gorgeous shade of shiny honey. The white linen stretched over copper wire that was bent and rounded into shapes like balloons that hung over the bed. A crisp blue-black wasp flew out of the white balloon and buzzed along the verdigris frame of the high window. The number of cars going by the brick edifice was building. It was the morning before Thanksgiving. I closed my eyes as I opened my mouth. “But tell me again why don’t you use salted butter in the challah?”
Jean-Louis lay his fingers on my lips, pushing the fleshy edges together gently like a petite chocolate roll. “The answers are here. If you can be still, listen, and watch.” He waved his hand in the air, his hand that I can’t tear my eyes from, and he brought it down to hold my fingers still as though if he could stop me from writing maybe I could see more. Feel more. Touch this numbness that has infected my life.
I was leaving my husband. But I told him, outside the bakery one day how I just wanted him to talk. About bread, just about bread. How is it that he chose bread. Or that bread chose him. Does it ever get to be too much, being this close? And how, if he has a clue, has bread changed his relationship with women and sex? For my blog, I added.
“Your blog?” He smiled.
Getting close to him made me tingle in ways I had forgotten. It scares me. He’s so enticing, like the fire in my oven. I get hypnotized looking at the brilliant bursts, the wood’s demise. Watching the flames. I just want to get close enough to feel his intensity, the heat. Without getting burned. I want only the warm dream and not to deal with the hard edges. Could I have both? Now I was being greedy; to slide myself past the words, through the emotions to plunge into my hunger.
“In kneading there is no geometry, no edges, no breaks. It is a seamless dream.
It’s work that can be done with the eyes closed. It is thus an intimate daydream.
It also has a rhythm, a hard rhythm that takes over the whole body. It is thus vital.
What is more, this reverie bred by working the dough harmonizes with the desire for a special power, with the male exultation of penetrating the substance, stroking the inside of substances, knowing the grain from within, mastering the earth as intimately as water masters it, reclaiming an elemental force, taking part in the struggle of the elements, of participating in an irresistible power of dissolution.”
Gaston Bachelard, Water and Dreams
Joy retreated downstairs.
He straddled me and the lace camisole I was wearing came off in a single bite.
I knelt with him. His thighs lengthened along mine. My breasts felt warm as he cupped them. His little batard was at work, and pressed against me. The tension I felt along its edges, made me want to weep with pleasure. My fingers felt the drops of his anticipation and I spread them around the crown of his batard.
I lay back and begged him on top of me. He entered eagerly – but then he knew and I did too, that our consummation, like the loaves rising downstairs should develop and mount with excruciatingly slowness.
I bent to take him in my mouth - a little afraid that the wasp would fly down and while I was so distracted sting me my arm or my hand. Making me swell like Jean-Louis.
He tasted like the days I passed the bakery - burnt leavings of bread. Crispy sesame seeds. Crusts and yeast. Sweat. I imagined him kneading the bread as they used to, the stories he told me of how they stood in the bread trough and the bread was embellished with the flavor of the Boulanger’s sweat. He was sweaty and earthy when we talked outside the bakery that day I told him I was leaving. When he hugged me his arms he emitted a scent like a plump mushroom unearthed from the floor of the forest. I adored filling my mouth with his sweet tender little boules. But then I am not really sure if I should write that it was his moans or mine that I enjoyed more. Who am I kidding? I can’t write this on my blog.
I angled myself better able to take his length and he sat up at the head of the bed. The sheets folded and ruffled against me, between my legs. My excitement moistening, my lips open and glistening as if brushed with our egg wash and sprinkled with coarse sea salt and pebbly seeds of coriander.
His brown arms bulged. His eyes, a deep smoke. His sex scented like garlic and the spring onions on the hill. My arm circled his thigh. His hand lowered and his fingers traced the curl of my ear. He lifted and gathered my hair, twisting it up gently against the back of my head and then let it fall over his leg. My back shivered as he hardened and then I swallowed his spiced wine. I pressed my cheek against his thigh. Under his skin his muscles caressed his bones. His legs, bent, and his thick arms coiled from carrying the trays of bread, are his being. His heat it turned out, was kinder than the fire. And when I leave without telling him, he will carry that with him always.
I covered him with the baby blue blanket – the color of the sky and turned to lift the handle on the door, go down the stairs, ready to roll baguettes.
Originally published October 2010