• Editor's Note: Alexander Laurence is a noted critic of contemporary fiction, the managing editor of Cups Magazine in New York, and a writer of epicurean fiction. The Story of Bliss is a recent work. JSJ.

T H E   S T O R Y   O F   B L I S S

by Alexander Laurence
c. 1998

Until I reached the age of twenty I possessed a great fear of women. The vision of women's flesh disturbed me immensely. When I was younger I did not know any girls, and I did not have any girlfriends. I had attended boy schools and restrictive Catholic schools. I knew nothing about women. I never desired to know one either. I had spent those years by myself or with my homosexual friends. Sometimes I would have dreams of women, some of which were horrible nightmares where I would wake up screaming in an outrageous terror. My body would be destroyed with sweat and anxiety. I hated dreams: they did not mean a thing.

And then one day when I was in X. I was completely changed in my attitude towards women when I was introduced to Minette at a party. She was the only woman there. We started to talk only because all the other men went into the different rooms of the large house to have sex. My attempts at interesting conversation were clumsy and I tripped over my own speech. Some men walked out into the garden. I did not have sex at this time, I preferred celibacy being a potential religious student, so I felt quite left out of the party. It did not bother me that this open display of sexual appetites were going on. I began to eat hors d'oeuvres to control my fear and my nervousness. I did not feel so lonely anymore. Our conversation was polite and on the surface. Somehow we parted ways following our own separate monologues.

On the tables there were sandwiches, cakes, puddings, ice creams, chocolates, wines, and some coffee. I may mention that there was quite a lot of serious drug use at this party, but I was not involved myself. I was told later how they used oxygen and amyl nitrate to intensify their orgasms. Later, I found out that one person had overdosed on heroin while another was choked to death. This person had used a wire to keep all of his blood in his head: he was carried away.

But a strange thing happened when I suddenly became excited, and took pleasure in my excitement, the same excitement a rooster has when seeing the sun for the first time, excited with the pagan desire to approach her again, to be with her, to talk with her, to confess everything about myself, even though she was a woman, a being who I was very awkward and unfamiliar with. I did not know who she was, or what she was: I did not know her at all. Perhaps she was going to be similar to the woman of my dreams: the one who was an inspiring combination of terror and beauty. At first, to make myself slightly comfortable, I pretended that Minette was a man, that she had a penis, even though she was definitely a beautiful woman. I preferred being deluded. I was obviously very good at it.

We talked quite frank and confessional immediately, to the point, cleaving through all the polite phrases: we did all this yet I do not know why. Perhaps it was the environment or perhaps it was that she felt as lonely and separate as I did. I told her about my stupid dreams, which I should have never done. She said that she also preferred life to dreams, for life is so mysterious and so dangerous. She talked about some of the books she had read recently, Pound and Yeats, and she quoted a few lines of poetry and made a gesture upwards, as if she corresponded to the muse. I did not read too much. Not as much as she did. I often lost my concentration in the silence. I often stared out a window and thought for hours. This boredom which I frequented was my occupation. All I thought about was death, and my own death. I did not see what compelled people to do what they do with death and terror all around them constantly. Most are immune, insensitive, to the violence of life.

Minette had been in London for a year and she told me about all her animated adventures. There she worked as an actress and wrote, had a few things published in the magazines, and in a short time Minette became extremely well known in the literary and theatrical circles. She left as part of a scandal, grew quite bored of life there. Minette came here to get away from that life for a while. She told me that she distrusted men. Her talk about the sexual things only made me shameful of my ignorance. Minette then said that most men make sure that the woman has the least amount of pleasure. I found her stories fascinating and interesting, but I had to admit my lack of knowledge on the subject. I told her that I was entirely ignorant concerning relations between the sexes, not having any experience. To my shame, and my rosy complexion, she laughed in the garden.

She walked away. I went to have a drink recognizing my failure in divulging such information in conversation. Later I saw Minette by herself leaning over a balcony with the lights shining over her body, as if water dripped over her, caressing her ardent figure, creating all at once a true scene of beauty. I walked up behind her to look out at the black sky and the pale moon: I was enraptured by everything and all. Down below were two men completely naked in each other's arms, kissing and clasping. Bodies which combined their sweat. I looked around peacefully and calmly watching the numerous acts of debauchery and excess, all surpassing description. And below one man shoved his cock in the other's anus. They began to fuck violently, screaming like animals do in the night because of hunger or violence. Time passed. Twenty minutes later Minette said: "Please take me home!"

(I must mention here, at the insistence of Minette, that she remembers how we met much differently. She absolutely believes that she came up to me and introduced herself. Minette told me that I was the first man that she had met altogether unlike her father in every way.)

There were two doors of thin glass, and wood light blue, by which we entered the solitary building which was Minette's apartment in X... Inside burned a lonely light and we came to the bottom of a two-sided staircase. Every wall seemed faded and grey, like the walls of a prison, like the walls of the school I attended when I was a little boy. Minette and I walked slowly, ascending the wobbly stairs, and on the first story we came to her door: apartment 7. When we went inside her room she asked me politely if I wanted anything to drink. Circularly I looked around, 360 degrees, at all the paintings and books that remained in the room. Her little gallery was inspiring and resplendent, the language of dreams, and I imagined that I was living in those paintings for they were so much a part of the vibrant ambiance.

On one side of the room there were five windows. The furniture which invited my attention included a black table with two chairs, a white-woven chair on both sides of the room, a trunk with a green scarf draped across, a black nightstand, and a series of shelves. Toward the back of the apartment, a kitchen and a bathroom, also I caught a glimpse of a fine lily-white bidet. A grey, black and white cat, slept on the windowsill unawakened by our entrance.

Minette brought me tea placing a tray gently on the shiny black table: a white porcelain teapot and a black clay cup, porcelain which is so closely related to sex for me, and clay which is a reminder of the funereal. I drank it quickly and pleasurably like a famished swine. It tasted bitter, but it was utterly delicious. The dark tea warmed my heart.

She told me that her last name was Bliss. I took pleasure in that word: Bliss. I included two meanings in the word which most do not: the ecstasy of bliss, and the orgasm (coming) which also means bliss. I soon discovered a feeling I had, this emotion was vague yet I knew how powerful it was at the same time. I felt that I wanted to be more intimate with Minette, as I have refused to be intimate with anyone, but this was an infatuation with her mind, her being, more than anything sexual. But of course I wished that I could see her stark naked in the future. I wished to see something that I have never seen. One must remember that I was a virgin at this time.

"You must love my black tea. Do you want more?" "Yes! It is good." "It is a unique and special tea which I do not prepare often. There is a drop of menstrual blood in it. I hope that you do not mind and that I have not interrupted your joy."

In the next few months my pure love for drinking menstrual blood evolved. With lovely Minette and myself it became a sacred rite, as if it was taking the place of spiritual communion, and soon I could drink, with no help, her entire menses every single month. I associated the word menses with the moon. Sometimes the blood would gather on the bottom of the cup. I would stir the sacred tea, serious as anything, to achieve the perfect taste: actually I did regard Minette's blood as if it was honey or sugar. Occasionally there was a little thick gelatinous substance in the menses. I discovered that this was the most savory bit.

In a sublime hour, days later, taking me completely unawares, Minette stood up and said: "This is the witching hour, when all the churchyards yawn, and the graveyards rule our senses. I could drink a cup of hot blood!"

In jest I took a knife and slit my wrist, blood squirting and shooting out everywhere. Minette lapped up all the blood and then started to suck on my wrist. She drank my blood as a vampire would. We laughed at this act of complete absurdity well into the night.

In my eyes, as if they were a camera taking a long time to focus on a subject, an understanding which could only happen with the passing of time, Minette became a sensual virulent being, and she bestowed to me a lofty air fruitfully suggestive of all the essential things linked to a deep sexuality: beauty, blood, sudden terror, crime, destruction, death, and uncertainty. So often we surprised each other with every act, every word, that we forgot about the world that surrounds us, and we remembered only our private and mysterious lives.