Alcock’s Autobiography 3.2

14 May 2011

14 May 2011

There is always a turning point, a pivotal action that propels the relationship in a certain irreversible direction. Ours occurred two nights later in the Daiichi Hotel in Tokyo. Giddy with the prospect of major export sales to Forestry and Agriculture, we shut down the bar and, as we started to say our drunken Goodnights, Kumiko impulsively invited me into her room for tea. “Just give me a few minutes to take a shower,” I said. I tapped on her door twenty minutes later wearing the yukata provided by the hotel. She too had showered and was wearing a yukata.

Bear in mind that until I had hesitantly extended my left hand across the foot of naked tatami to find and softly cradle her right hand as we lay in semi-darkness in our separate futon in the ryokan at Morioka, our relationship had been strictly business. I had avoided any sensual contact or innuendo and she too had initiated nothing. In that context, a little thing like holding hands took on enhanced significance. It seemed ingenuous somehow and pure. And prescient.

She offered me the one chair, a stool really, and sat on the narrow bed. We tried to sustain our gloat but the hour and the alcohol were taking their toll, and I started stretching and rolling my head around in a futile effort to undo a few knots in my neck and shoulders. She  asked in uncharacteristically awkward English if I wanted her to help. “Ee”, I said, which simply means Yes in Japanese but sounds non-committal in English. I pretended that it also conveyed some kind of Japanese macho, but I was probably wrong.

She squeezed by my side, briefly rubbing against my arm and leg, to get around back of me, and I felt a powerful urge to embrace her which I translated into capturing her forearm in my hand and bringing her hand to my lips and teeth. She closed her eyes and momentarily froze. Fully aroused, I stood up and as I wrapped her in my arms she responded in kind and we slid down upon her narrow bed, our yukata loosening and pulling away in front, so that my erection could proceed on its salmon-like journey upstream. We rubbed against each other, kissed, and Kumiko released a torrent of vital juices of a quantity that, frankly, I had not previously experienced. It was slippery everywhere down there, and soon she had her knees up and I was testing the waters— finding, anticipating, and finding pleasure again. I reached down to pilot the ship into the channel but the silky, frictionless surfaces made it hard to be sure where I was going. Finally, I found the channel and remained there a while, exercising our God-given right to fuck each other’s eyes out.

Now it was many years later in a discussion, the proximate causes of which are long forgotten, that Kumiko revealed to me that we had gone up the back channel, not the main one, on that night of our first sexual excursion.

“What did you think about that?” I had asked her.

“I thought it was what you liked.”

“Oh,” I said. “I was probably just drunk and didn’t notice.”

I was amazed at this revelation since I thought I remembered it well, and that feature, if it were true, was never part of my version. But many years after that, when Kumiko and the company were both things of the distant past, while conjuring images of that night, I began to recall thinking amidst the fumes of the spirits, the testosterone surges, the crescendos of fleshly pleasures, the atonement of a man and a woman— that a pregnancy here would not be quite fair, that it’d be prudent to reposition slightly and yes, explore the passage next door. Having some memory of thinking along those lines, I am now prepared to believe the Kumiko version as orthodox.

Of course there were disingenuous aspects to the beginning of the eight Kumiko years as well. Enough time has gone by now to look back and fess up to some.

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