breaking the sound barrier
 mf


We married young. Irish Catholics. Big city. East coast. We had done
everything but fuck. Always surrounded by big families, we learned how to
make each other come without making a sound.
M. was the essence of cute. Freckled. Small tits, small ass. A cheerleader
in high school, she became a member of a dance team that performed on the
sidelines of a pro football team. While she pranced in front of thousands, I
was in college in Milwaukee. The dance team appeared on the Mike Douglas
Show. I gathered half the dorm in the TV room to watch M.'s appearance.
Someone in the crowd suggested that these girls fucked the players. The
notion of football players warming their hands in M.'s crotch didn't leave
me for weeks. I found myself wildly hard and wildly jealous. About this
time, I started chasing off all suitors.
In my junior year I moved to an off-campus apartment. When M. visited me, we
came within a pubic hair of fucking. Middle of the night. The living room
floor. It was the first time I saw her nude. She looked fabulous. My three
roommates were within earshot.
Though, for two years we had had no qualms about hand jobs, cunnilingus,
blowjobs, the Church had scared the shit out of us. Out- of-wedlock real sex
was out of the question. We wouldn't fuck until we were married. Within
weeks of rolling over each other naked on the carpet, I proposed.
Big church wedding. Honeymoon on Cape Cod. M. moved to Milwaukee at the
start of my senior year. We lived in a dingy apartment west of the campus.
The guy who shot George Wallace lived down the street but we never got to
meet him.
I had gotten the courage to ask M. if she had ever fooled around with any
football players. Asking the question made me hard. M. returned the question
with some tales of flirting but no gangbang in the locker. Her stories bored
me, and I couldn't keep myself from thinking that there was more lurking
behind those girlish tales.
At night, I started to teach M. how to masturbate. She said she had never
done it. For someone whose ninth grade idea of a science project was to see
how long it would take to collect a pint of cum, the idea of never putting a
hand on or in one's own sex was beyond me. All those digit-interruptus
nights when her father would throw a shoe down the stairs and I would flee,
hoping old Danny couldn't hear my zipper zipping. I would go home and blast
myself into orgasm. How could M. put on her PJs and not finger herself after
all that foreplay?
So I decided my wife would learn to play with herself. Under weak protest,
she would begin to touch herself. For hours I would put my face close to her
cunt and watch her fingers. We spent more hours playing with each other,
talking quietly. We took great joy in making sounds when we came. I still
remember the look on her face when I took her hand and put her fingers on
her mouth. Then I took her fingers and put them on her sex or on her
breasts. I liked to see her breasts wet with her own saliva. I liked to
watch her spit mix with her other juices. We continued this practice for
years. But she never voluntarily moved her own hand to her own mouth. I
always moved it for her.
On the other side of the bedroom wall was the apartment of a middle-aged
single man. He spent hours on the phone yelling at someone, probably his
ex-wife. He would get pretty drunk and say over and over, "Make the kid a
man." After he got off the phone he would be quiet, but we knew he was
there. I never told M. this, but it gave me great pleasure to hear her coo
while knowing that that guy was over there. One Saturday afternoon, he
banged on our door. In a gruff way, he asked if we could please stop
"giggling" at night. Our sex got very quiet again.
The giggling had lasted about six months. Life suddenly got serious. I
announced to the families that I was going to resist the draft. I got an
envelope from my mother. The tuition payment book and a one-word note were
enclosed. "Shit," the note said. Danny, on the phone, had M. writhing on the
floor in tears. She never told me exactly what he said. I'm sure it wasn't
imaginative, probably something on the order of "commie pinko coward."
In April or May they held the first draft lottery. Number 72. Luck was no
longer an option. A series of bombings canceled the graduation. We rented a
truck and packed up for Philly.
My onetime roommate, Paul, came along. On the way, two things happened. One
was Kent State. The other event, also in Ohio, was this: In the middle of
the night, Paul driving, me in the passenger seat and M. very close to me,
standing in the shallow well between the passenger seat and the door. With
my arms folded, my left hand touched her closest breast until her nipple
became very hard. It was easy. No bra, summer blouse, dark truck. No way
Paul could see.
When M.'s hips started moving slightly, I found a way to put my hand on her
crotch without Paul noticing. It seemed as if it took me hours to get the
zipper of her jeans down. I could hear every click. M. never tried to stop
me. If Paul heard anything, he wasn't saying. M.'s cotton panties were
soaked. Her lips spread easily. I fingered her until she came, which she
achieved without making a sound. It took some arranging, but a couple of
years later I would watch Paul fuck M.