The Art and Science of Love
8
Sensory Deprivation
REAL ESTATE open houses have two purposes. The first is to convince the sellers that the agent is doing something to market their house. The second is to get leads and new clients who are usually sold other houses. Only rarely—less than one percent of the time—does an open house result in the sale of the property being shown.
So, it was logical that on the one weekend I was too self-absorbed to sit at my own opens, a rookie agent with no listings of her own would clinch a deal for the house I listed.
That’s not such a bad thing. It cuts my commission in half, but that’s the half a listing agent normally expects to give to the selling agent. A seven percent commission is split between the selling agent and the buying agent. Of course, that half is split with the broker who holds the agent’s license. Still, one-point-seven-five percent of $750,000 is still over $13,000. Not bad. Especially since it was my second closing in 30 days. I would be banking most of it, just so I’d have something over the off-season in the winter. The chance of making a sale between November 1 and March 1 was less than half of the rest of the year. I knew agents who had separate businesses in Arizona and closed up shop in the North to spend the winter there.
On the other hand, my prospects for winter were looking up. After our soul-baring weekend, Rita had continued to come to me for instruction in the art of love, but as often as not, we simply met as lovers. We had made a deeper emotional connection. We hadn’t had the talk yet—the one about the future and commitment. I’d been shy about committing to any woman since my college freshman girlfriend—who I thought I’d be with forever—left me. Oh, she didn’t leave me during our freshman year. She left me the summer after graduation, exactly two months after our first wedding anniversary. I was shell-shocked at the time and almost missed my first week of graduate school because I hadn’t emerged from my funk. The reason she was leaving me, she said, was that multiple orgasms on demand simply wasn’t enough for her. Apparently, I got an ‘A’ in sex and flunked marriage. For the first time since then, I was allowing myself to become attached; it was a frightening though rather pleasant thought.
And so it was that we found ourselves in the studio one Saturday afternoon with Rita posing as my model.
The pose featured her as a woman clinging to her lover who was turning away. In order to get the setting right, I’d positioned a male mannequin facing three-quarters away from my chaise. I had Rita lie on her back and then twist her upper body to fling her arms around the mannequin. It was a delicious and erotic image when I just stood there to look at it. It didn’t hurt that I’d positioned her with my hands, paying special attention to the exact position of her breasts and pussy. All the time, I’d given her strict instructions to stay perfectly still as I caressed her, just as her mannequin boyfriend did. I’d left her moist and panting as I went to my easel and began laying in the detail work on canvas.
“This would be a lot more fun if Studly here was better equipped,” Rita said as she stroked her left hand up and down the mannequin’s featureless crotch.
“Well, perhaps we can find a substitute for Studly when the posing is over,” I said. This was our fourth sitting for this painting and I was about finished. “That’s enough for today. I think we’re pretty much done with this.”
“Can I see it now?” she asked as she stood up and stretched. I clicked a mental photograph of that position. Her hands were stretched above her head as she went up on tiptoe and arched her body back and forth. I could almost see the scene in front of me.
“Yes, I suppose so.” I hadn’t let her see the development of the piece and wasn’t all that sure I wanted her to see it now. I’d never felt uncomfortable showing my work to a model before. She padded over to me in her bare feet (and bare everything else) and looked at the canvas. I stood aside. Her brow creased. She tilted her head to one side in a reflection of the position she had held over the course of two weekends and four sittings. The expression on her face was not one of rapture.
“Uh… Doc… I know I’m not an art critic, but…”
“…but you know what you like,” I said finishing the cliché that I’d heard repeatedly over the twenty years of my career.
“No. I know when something really sucks. This is terrible.” The passion of her comment shocked me. After painting the canvas of Allison, I’d decided to do a series I’d mentally captioned Burning Love. I’d laid in a flaming background, repeating the themes from the earlier work with flame dripping from the cock. But Rita was not through with her scathing criticism yet. “Is that how you see me? With your artist’s eye am I truly such a bitch? It’s not just that it doesn’t look like me, it’s that it makes me look so awful! I don’t ever want to sit for you again!”
“Rita. It’s not a portrait of you. It’s a portrait of something in my head. The model is just a reference point. I wanted to make a series out of the canvas I did of Allison. I don’t think of you personally that way. Lots of artists use the same model for all kinds of works. Just think of Picasso. His mistress was his model but no one would suggest that his paintings ‘looked’ like her.”
“You’ve told me about Picasso,” Rita said. She was pulling her clothes on angrily—not just the robe she usually slipped into, but dressing to leave. “Where’s that book?” I assumed she meant my book of Picasso. I retrieved it and she dragged me over to sit and look at the book. My style was nothing like Picasso, but I’d always admired his work. She began turning pages, focusing on the paintings of his famous model, Marie-Thérèse Walter, the mother of one of his children. “Look at these,” Rita said. “They don’t look like her but they look…” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “They look like he loved her.” She looked over at my painting. “Not like that! You showed more love in your painting of Allison.”
She left the book in my lap and stormed out of the house.
I opened my eyes. I’d collapsed in bed after Rita left and just thought about what I’d painted until I was so exhausted from my own confusion, I fell asleep. I could see it. I knew what I’d done. I’d used Rita as a placeholder as I attempted to paint Allison again. And I hadn’t done a particularly good job of it. My original painting had been free and uninhibited. This one was deliberate and controlled—exactly the opposite of what I felt when I painted Allison. It was an inappropriate theme superimposed on an incompatible subject. None of what I’d captured in the first painting was present in the second. Technique overrode passion. It was mechanical. There were flames but the painting was cold. That fleeting grasp of a breakthrough in my art now looked like an unhappy accident I’d never reach again. I would go back to the studio and scrape the paint off the canvas and prep it for another painting.
It was late but I still thought I’d go back to the studio. The room was dark. But something had awakened me from the dream of destroying my latest canvas. At first, I thought it was just an aftershock of Rita’s tearful departure, but something else was nagging at me.
I heard a rustle in the room and reached to turn on my bedside lamp, but my hand was arrested by a soft but firm grasp on my wrist.
“Rita?”
“Shh. Trust me.” It was whispered but I was sure it was Rita. She had a key to my house and often came in at unexpected times. I lay still, only moving slightly to help her remove my clothes. The one time I reached for her soft skin, she firmly returned my hand to my side. I couldn’t figure out what she was up to.
She pushed me over onto my stomach and arranged my arms straight down at my sides and my legs straight out with my feet together. I must have rolled onto a fresh sheet as she tugged a folded edge out from under me and pulled the opposite edge over my back and tucked it in at my side. She rolled me onto my back again. I was effectively strapped in. I started breathing a little rapidly. I was sure I could get out as long as she didn’t tie anything around me. But I didn’t know what she planned. She’d been angry when she left. Was she about to take revenge on me? That simply didn’t fit with her character. I was sure she had a purpose, but I couldn’t still my racing heart. I relaxed slightly as she positioned a comfortable pillow beneath my head in exactly the way I like it when I sleep.
She next placed a sleeping mask over my eyes. It was heavy. A bag filled with some small grain like rice, slightly warm and not uncomfortable but sealing my eyes closed with no chance of a stray flicker of light impinging on my sight. I could see the color bursts behind my eyelids that always accompany pressure on the eyes—mostly reds and oranges with tinges of blue fading into the black at the edges. Gradually, the color subsided and there was no signal sent to my optic nerve at all.
Again, I felt her breath on my face as she leaned near my ear. I could feel the goosebumps rising on my flesh as the gentle breath blew across my neck.
“Trust me?” came the whispered voice in my ear again. This time it was more of a question than a command. A request for confirmation—for permission. I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t trust my voice to make the right sounds with my heart beating so rapidly. I merely nodded slightly. “Then relax,” she whispered.
I felt a pair of earphones being placed over my ears. I moved slightly to get them comfortable, expecting to hear pleasant music or maybe a gentle voice through the headset lulling me to sleep. Instead, everything went silent. There was a very slight white noise stimulating my eardrum, but like the colors behind my eyes, I wasn’t sure if it was from an external source or if it was simply my nerves filling in blanks that I normally wasn’t aware of.
If you plug your ears with your fingers, you might effectively block out most of the ambient sound that surrounds us all the time. Sounds of the house, the furnace, the refrigerator, water in the pipes, outside traffic. You find these sounds replaced gradually by an awareness of your own internal sounds. Your breathing, the rustle of fabric against your hair, your own heartbeat. But the silence descending on me was complete. I couldn’t hear my own body. I could hear nothing outside it.
And time was suspended.
I am an artist and, while that is not synonymous with ‘drug addict,’ I have had my occasional brush with mind alteration. There comes a point when smoking a little weed that time slows down. Or perhaps one’s awareness of time is suspended. Everything moves in slow motion and until you emerge from your stupor, you have no concept of time’s passage. You might be surprised when you look at a clock to find that hours have passed or that only a few minutes have crawled by.
As I lay in my bed with no more movement possible than a twitch of my fingers or toes, no sight or sound perceived, the same feeling of time suspension descended upon me. I had no idea how long I lay there. My heart rate and breathing slowed. I could no longer feel the thudding in my chest but assumed I was still alive. After I stilled my racing thoughts and relaxed enough to stop being curious about what she was doing, I discovered I was really quite comfortable. In fact, I drifted back into sleep.
I awoke to featherlike touches on my crotch. I started, suddenly not sure if I was awake or simply lost in a dream of deafness and darkness. My heart started to race again when I realized I couldn’t move. Just before panic set in, I remembered Rita’s whispered words to trust her. I was in sensory deprivation.
I’ve dreamt before of losing my sight and remembered being in a huge cave once when the guide turned out the lights to give everyone an idea of what it was like to be in complete silence and darkness underground. The silence was short-lived as people began to shuffle and titter almost at once. But the darkness was complete and awesome. For a few moments, one’s eyes played tricks and there was the impression of seeing lights, realizing it was nothing more than the retina being repaired and the optic nerve sending signals that originated before the lights went out. But those afterimages fade. The result, surprisingly, is not blackness. The rods and cones in the retinal layer continue to fire somewhat randomly, even in darkness. The result is what I can only describe as texture. I’ve tried repeatedly to capture that randomness on canvas, but something about the canvas itself and the reflectivity of the paint overwhelms the texture of the dark.
As I attempted to open my eyes beneath the mask on my face, I felt the lids scrape against the fabric. It was uncomfortable and resulted in no more light information than when they were closed. Rita was clever to use the rice or sand bag as a sleep mask. Its satin cover was gentle but unyielding when my eyelids fluttered and the compression of the grains molded the mask tightly to my upper face. There was no chance for light to leak in.
Even more startling, however, was the silence. When Rita initially placed what I assumed were noise-cancelling earphones on my ears I was intensely aware of the white noise that played through them. Waking up with them in place, however, I no longer had a ready point of reference for judging what I heard. I can only describe it the same way I describe the darkness behind my eyes. It was a textured silence. I sometimes have a bit of ringing in my ears—a mild form of tinnitus. In severe cases, people hear all kinds of random ringing, music, and even voices when fluids in the ear build up and apply pressure to the delicate hearing organs. I could hear nothing. As the old adage says, “I couldn’t hear myself think.”
My careful assessment of my vision and hearing had calmed my heart rate and I became increasingly aware of the feathery touches in my groin. At first, I thought I was imagining things and my fantasies were all that stimulated me. I applied the same focused examination of touch, however, as I had of sight and sound. Skin is the largest single organ of the body. In most places, it is about seven layers thick. The bottom layer—the dermis—contains the complex network of nerves that give us the sensory perception we call touch. The penis, however, has only three layers of skin, exposing the nerve endings to more direct and intense stimuli. Only the female clitoris and the human lips have more nerve endings than those in the penis.
Why does an artist know all this? We have to study human anatomy.
But it was all head-knowledge—and I mean the type where the brain is. With the blocking of my ears and eyes and the binding of all my body, it seemed the only sensations coming to my brain were coming from my cock. I was gradually gaining an erection.
Perhaps not so gradually, now that I was aware of it.
There seemed to be an opening in the sheet that bound the rest of my body because there was no restriction to my rising penis. It found warm air. I could define temperature, wind direction, and moisture from the sensations assaulting my cock. It was a regular weather vane. As it rose, I felt light soft touches, felt breath circling me, felt a gradual moistening of the glans. Amazing. Unless I’d used my hand (or someone else’s), I’d never actually felt the pre-come seeping out of my cock. Now I could tell it was there by the temperature change when she breathed on me.
When her hand gently grasped me, I was aware of the exact position of every finger. My mind immediately jumped to the assessment that it was her right hand. It was dry but soft, gliding in a circular motion around my cock with the thumb starting next to my abdomen and twisting to the underside as her fingers glided around. Then her left hand joined in. First, it was just the flat of her palm pressed softly against the opening where my pre leaked in a steady flow. Rather than stroking up and down, her hands kept up the twisting motion left and right—fingers and thumb at the base and flat of the palm at the top.
I’d always known stimulation of my nipples could be felt in my cock. It is one of the most pleasant sensations a lover can provide. I can only assume the same response in a woman since licking a nipple often leads to moistening of the pussy. What I’d never felt before, though, was the tingling in my nipples resulting from the stimulation of my cock. I could feel my nipples harden beneath the sheet as my prick distended to an impossible size. Of course, I had no actual reference to compare its size with my normal erection, but it felt like it was filling the universe. I lost myself to the sensation and didn’t attempt to restrain myself when my orgasm shook my entire body with such intensity that I couldn’t breathe for several seconds.
Another new sensation wrapped me up. This time a warm moist cloth gently bathed me and I felt the coarse fabric in opposition to the unbelievable softness of her hand. When the cloth was taken away, my penis cooled rapidly in the air as the water evaporated until I felt her breath closing in on me and the tip of my penis being sucked tentatively between her lips.
She went at it slowly. Since our night of instruction, Rita had progressed into a fantastic fellatrix. Someday, I thought, I’d have to write a thank you note to her former fiancé. I saw a flash of color behind my eyes as I thought of her and felt her warm lips caressing my erection.
I had no idea how long this blowjob had been going on. Her rhythms were irregular. She would suck a while, bob her head a few times, and pull back to stroke again. I never really softened after the first hand job, much to my amazement. She was doing an incredible job of keeping me on edge without letting me come again. There was nothing I could do but lie there and take it. Bound in the sheet as I was, I couldn’t really even thrust. I occasionally tightened my pelvic muscles a little and was rewarded by feeling the head of my cock expand in her mouth, but she often pulled back when she felt this. I calmed myself and let her do the driving. I had so much come built up, though, my eyes were leaking behind the sleep mask.
Then her mouth seemed to harden. Her tongue was tighter against my cock and she slid farther down on it with little bounces that kept jostling her head and mouth down on my cock. She was coming! I’d had my cock in her mouth when she came on occasion but I guess I was so caught up in my own satisfaction that I’d never noticed how her mouth and tongue felt when she came. One hand gripped me more tightly as her mouth continued to throb around my cock. With the sudden intensity of feeling her orgasm, my cock exploded into her throat.
I don’t know whether she swallowed, held it in her mouth and spit it out, or just let it run out of her mouth as I came. It made no difference at all. My release was so sudden and hard that I blacked out for a moment. I don’t know how long I was out. I awoke to the sensation of having my cock bathed with the warm wet cloth again. I was still hard (again?) and the soft washing was followed by yet another tongue bath. Another flash of color behind my eyes and in the back of my mind an image began to take shape. I lost it immediately when she straddled me.
I could tell by the pressure against my arms her feet were toward my head, which meant she was in a reverse cowgirl position. Her hands continued to stroke me, making certain I was hard. She stroked the head of my cock through her slit and ran it around her clit. It was a delicious sensation, but I realized I was being given a lesson as well. She was showing exactly how she wanted my cock to stroke her, how long she wanted me to wait before plunging in. A wonderful reversal in the student/teacher roles. Without saying a word, I was learning more about how to pleasure Rita.
She brought my cock to her opening three times before she began to slide down on me. She couldn’t have had more than a couple of inches in her when she stopped. Her hand still gripped my cock outside her pussy and I thought for a moment she was pulling off me as I felt her rise until only the head was still in her. Then her hand released me and she suddenly plunged down on my cock all the way. I jerked my upper body forward, bending at the waist, nearly dislodging my blindfold.
This wasn’t Rita.
I’m not a connoisseur of pussies, meaning if you lined up all the lovers I’ve had in my life and I inserted my cock into each one, I would be unable to tell which pussy belonged to which lover. But I would be able to tell differences between them—differences in depth, tightness, texture, and occasionally, an oddity. This pussy had an anomaly I’d never felt when fucking Rita.
Well up inside her vagina, there was a bend or fold such that when I was fully seated in her, I could feel the ridge pushing against the left side of my cock. I froze in position and forced myself to lie back and return to my sensory deprived state. Who was this? I couldn’t think of a lover I’d had who felt like this and was at a loss to think what friend Rita might have brought to share me. She’d asked me to trust her. There wasn’t much else I could do. I wasn’t going to shout out that I didn’t want a strange pussy lodged on my cock, though my racing heart was telling me to panic.
I was bound, deprived of sight and sound, titillated under false assumptions, and fucked. In other words, had I not acquiesced to trusting Rita, I could claim to have been raped. A war raged in my head over whether to be offended by Rita’s betrayal of trust, or to be thankful to her for introducing another—and now that I considered it, quite delightful—experience for us to share. All through this inner battle, the lover hadn’t moved. She simply sat on my pole with her butt firmly against my abdomen.
I’ve seen men’s cocks that when aroused point out at a ninety-degree angle from their bodies. I point up and to the left. The skin on the top of my penis is simply much tighter than that below and it pulls me upright, so fully erect, there is only an inch or two between my penis and my stomach when I’m standing. As a result, the reverse cowgirl position pulls me forward and down. When at last she rose and plunged onto me again, she pulled me even farther forward and I scraped along the inside of her channel almost painfully. It seemed she was working her clit up and down along my shaft as she began to rise and fall, slowly at first and then more and more quickly. The mild pain due to the distension of my cock kept me from approaching an orgasm myself, even through her first and second climaxes shuddering around me. I could feel her hand reach down to cup my balls and then stroke up along my shaft until she reached her clit, where I could feel the vibration as she rubbed quickly.
I disconnected my higher thought processes—what were left of them—and decided to simply enjoy the ride. I started to bend my knees so I could thrust up against her, but they were firmly pushed back down to the bed. I was supposed to be a passive recipient of this sexual experience, not a participant. When I’d relaxed my legs back down flat, my partner seemed to relax as well. She leaned back with her hands behind her and began sliding more vigorously up and down. This released some of the downward pressure against me and I quickly began to mount toward my own climax.
It was then I received the next confirmation that this was a two-person act. I knew her hands were both beside me from the pressure against the bed and my arms, but another hand began caressing my nuts and playing with our joining. I was trembling from the nearness of my climax. Finally, I felt a tongue at our joining and it vibrated as it flicked against my partner’s clit and back against my cock. After only a few of these flicks, my lover began to convulse in orgasm again, tripping me over the edge as well. Even after two climaxes previously during this encounter, I was still pumping enough fluid out my penis to dehydrate me. She seemed in no hurry to disconnect and leave, holding me inside until my spent tool finally softened and slid out of her of its own accord.
I was bathed again, my cock kissed repeatedly—in fact, so often I began to wonder if it was only two women or if Rita had invited her entire whine and dine group. But my cock was no longer rising, even with the thought of six women worshipping it. At last, there was a single pair of lips that slipped over the glans, gave it a soft suck, and let it pop out of their grasp.
Then there was nothing.
I lay there waiting. I may have drifted a bit as I tried to understand the images playing behind my eyes and the sounds I thought I should be hearing. I thought about rolling over and releasing myself but couldn’t work up the energy to do it.
Finally, I felt hands move back to my crotch, but instead of grasping me, they tugged the sheet wrapped around me. It tore from little head to big head, suddenly relaxing the pressures against my arms. The headset canisters were removed and I heard the softest of whispers against my ear as the flood of house noises came rushing in on me.
“Now, go paint,” she said. Then I was alone.
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