The Pornographer from New York
by D. J. Bensonhurst
Melanie's grandmother, a retired librarian in Topeka,
used to call me the pornographer from New York
because I had written a novel with a PG-13 sex scene
that referred to an orgasm as a symphony of screams.
Those were the days when Melanie secretly lived with me
in a downtown apartment, where she showed me that the key
instruments for actually performing such a symphony
were a strong pair of handcuffs and a bowl filled with ice cubes.
Melanie taught me more about the music of the flesh
than my book pretended to know: the rhythm of the feather boa,
the melody of two fur gloves, the harmony of red fingernails
working in unison with glossed lips. And after we had completed
our final movement in the tangled sheets of my brass bed,
Melanie orchestrated her way across America,
in search of other novelists in need of a conductor:
the brooding intellectual in Chicago,
the bitter prophet in Philadelphia
and the enterprising visionary in LA.
It was the last one, the man with the Armani smile,
who left her to sob in the silence of his beach house
when she told him she needed an abortion.
I flew cross-country to sit with her in the recovery room
and then rode with her on the Greyhound back to Kansas,
where she could pretend she was recuperating from an appendectomy.
The grandmother was waiting for us when we arrived at the terminal.
She frisked Melanie with a hug and then sized me up with a handshake,
staring with a squint at the book-sized bulges in my backpack as she said,
"So I finally get to meet you. The pornographer from New York."
D.J. Bensonhurst is a writer in New York City.