The Cocoon

“I’ve been having this need to cry for a while. Over two weeks now. It feels overwhelming, like I’m about to break into tears, like I’m going to let loose and cry. But it doesn’t happen.” He was looking at her through the hair hanging over his eyes, almost completely covering them.
“Tell me again about the cocoon you found this afternoon,” she said, urging him with her hands to continue talking, a gesture that looked more appropriate for driving cattle through a slaughter chute than encouraging him to continue sharing his feelings.

It was a sunny afternoon, about 80 degrees. One of his sons called out to him from the shed, waving a little tree branch. The boy was no older than ten, stocky, four or five inches taller than the average for his age. When he reached the shed, the boy pointed at a swelling on the branch. They examined it and realized it was an empty cocoon.

“It’s probably from a butterfly,” said the boy excitedly.

He agreed, thinking that there was no way to know what kind of insect had been in that thing. In any case, he was glad the cocoon was empty, its occupant gone.

“You could put it in a Ziploc bag and take it to school, to your science class. Your teacher should be able to tell you what kind of butterfly it was.”

The boy walked to the house to look for a bag, smiling at the thought of bringing it to school.

“It made me feel lonely,” the man resumed. “Very lonely. So lonely, I had to go to the bathroom when I felt I was about to cry, to hide and not be seen. But I couldn’t cry.”

The boy came back with a large Ziploc bag containing the branch and the empty cocoon.

“This is it,” he said, pointing at the cocoon. “See the hole on this end? That’s where the butterfly exited.

The boy took a deep breath, like he had just come up from underwater. He continued pointing at the hole as his limp hand lowered.

“What’s wrong with it?” she asked. He liked her; she was a good friend, and even though she was a psychoanalyst, she could still be objective when they talked about his problems.
“There’s nothing wrong with it,” he said, “at least nothing I can tell. That’s how I feel: an empty cocoon with a hole, clinging to a dead branch on a pile of leaves and grass clippings.”
…

“Dame duro!” she would say when she was getting close to climaxing. “Más duro!”
For a little woman like her, so unassuming and proper, she would completely transform during sex.
“It’s not that I didn’t like it. It was more that it’d take me by surprise every single time,” said Briar.

His friend watched him from the recliner, seated no more than five feet away from the fire pit and probably the same distance from Briar. He thought that him, Briar, and the fire pit made a perfect triangle, much like the story Briar was telling him. He was about to mention it but changed his mind at the last minute.

“Maybe later,” he thought.

Tace had been friends with Briar for a few years. This was the first time, though, that Briar had shared details of his sex life. Briar seemed like he would talk about anything and everything, as if his life were an open book for anybody to look into.
Tace knew that was not the case. Briar gave that impression, but he never, ever would discuss private matters, not even during one of their famously deep, profound conversations.

“This is a first,” he said to Briar. “You’ve never shared with me what you do with your girlfriends in bed.”

“I guess you’re right. I’m as surprised as you are!” He stopped talking to move a thick log a few inches farther into the fire.
“Dame duro!” Tace screamed in a girl’s voice, mocking him.
“Make fun of me all you want,” Briar said, waving him away while making sure the fire was stocked. “We had sex the very first time we met. I told you we met at the beach that night. I think she thought it would be safer to meet in a public place, but the night was windy and cold, and the beach was empty.” He looked around as he had done at the beach. “After a while, it started drizzling. We got into my car. She had walked there, and we went to her place.”
“She walked?” Tace asked in surprise. He was so used to getting into his car just to go to the market around the corner.
“Yes, but I didn’t know she lived so close to the beach. I thought she was being careful about meeting a stranger. Anyway, we got to her house and lay down on a big couch to watch a movie.” Briar made a face to indicate the absurdity of the situation. “Her house was lovely: a huge TV, a big couch, a fireplace, but no trace of anybody living there. Everything was in its place. Every nook and cranny was clean as a whistle. It looked like a model house in an architecture magazine. There was no soul whatsoever in that house. It was a house, not a home.”

…

The woman stroked his hand and spoke softly. “Briar, the cocoon is empty now, but it was the home of a caterpillar during its transformation. The caterpillar is gone now. Do you think the comparison with your life might be what made you sad?”
“I’m not sure,” he replied slowly, barely moving his mouth, which made his words hard to understand. Briar knew he did this and that he needed to speak out, but he couldn’t help it. It drove Jemima crazy. Sometimes he did it on purpose, but not this time.
Jemima was a new friend. They’d known each other for only a few months, but they had clicked, and now they shared the most intimate details of their lives: her marriage was on the rocks, and she was desperate to save it. He called her Thinker Bell. She was an overthinker, a good trait for a psychoanalist. She had listened to Briar’s sex stories many times. She’d asked questions that not even his male friends would ask him, and he had answered them. Briar had a hunch that Thinker Bell had a thing for him, but he pretended not to notice for the sake of their friendship.
“I looked inside the cocoon. It was completely empty! I was hoping to find something, food remains, caterpillar poop, anything, but it looked like it had been brushed clean for inspection.” He looked as surprised now as he had been when he first inspected the cocoon.
…
“We had sex on that couch that night.”
The flames were shorter now, making Briar’s face look demonic, like a mempo, one of those Japanese armor masks designed to intimidate the enemy. Had Tace been more religious, he might have felt apprehensive. Being the independent thinker he was, he found the play of shadows across his friend’s face interesting.
“One night, we were talking about relationships and sex. I mentioned that I had found her skin amazingly attractive. I asked whether she had felt anything similar that first night. She said we had sex because, as she put it, ‘Why are you not going to let yourself be given love?’ Can you believe that shit?” Briar looked genuinely disheartened. “Meaning it could have been anybody…”
“Dame más duro,” said Tace, mimicking the woman and trying to steer Briar back to the story.
“Oh, yeah,” he said. “I almost forgot. So, we would have sex every time we saw each other. Some nights for hours, sometimes the whole night. At first, I’d come eventually, after her. But over time, the sex got longer, and it became difficult for me to have an orgasm. She was delighted. She’d have two or three in a row. I’d go home with my dick in pain, the skin so raw that even the brush of my underwear would hurt for a day or two.”
“That bad?” Tace asked, incredulous mostly about the endurance rather than the skin problem.
“Yeah, it was a problem. And you know what?” he added, adjusting his pants as though telling the story had brought the pain back for a moment. “I didn’t know what the problem was. I thought I’d have to go to the doctor for some dick problem. I was worried. Really worried. Imagine fucking for two hours and not being able to cum at all!”
Tace looked at his friend with a half-smile. “I can’t imagine what it’s like to be able to fuck for two hours. It only takes me a few minutes once I’m inside, and then I’m out of commission for the rest of the night.”
“Whatever,” said Briar, downplaying the comment and allowing his friend to save face. “You know what I mean.”
Tace had always been envious of Briar’s sexual prowess. It wasn’t that he doubted the stories. Several of the women themselves had told him how good Briar was in bed and how long he could keep going. Tace had never admitted his envy.
“One day, after a whole night of sex with no orgasm, for me at least, I went home and decided to masturbate, just to see if I could come. I could! My dick was working fine!”

“One day, after giving her all I had and not coming, I started playing with my semi-limp dick against her ass. Until then, she hadn’t wanted to have anal sex because she thought it was gonna hurt. I was rubbing it against her hole, pushing at it a little, and she didn’t complain. She actually started getting excited. I kept playing like that for a while, hoping I’d get hard again, but I was spent for the night.”
Tace listened closely, unable to believe the level of disclosure.
Briar looked at him to make sure he was still awake and continued. “A few days later, I went to visit her and noticed there were books in the fireplace. Not ON the fireplace. IN the fireplace, where the logs would go. I made a joke about other people who used to burn books, but she didn’t get it. We had dinner, then went to bed to watch TV and have sex. While we were having sex, she turned sideways and asked me to fuck her in the ass. I did, of course, and I came good. A deep, satisfying orgasm, nothing like those weak, delayed orgasms I’d been having lately. She liked it too, and from that day on, we started having anal sex every time. It didn’t last long, though, shortly after I was back with the subpar orgasms.”
…
“I don’t know what I imagined would be inside the cocoon,” Briar said before Thinker Bell could ask her question. It wasn’t the question she had been about to ask, but it was a good one, so she let him continue. “I really have no idea, but if the cocoon is an insect’s home, shouldn’t there be something besides the insect itself?”
“You mean little furniture, tiny pictures hanging on the walls, something like that?” she asked seriously, though as she heard herself say it, she realized how stupid it sounded.
“Yes, like in a cartoon,” Briar said sarcastically. “A little door with a little peephole, a little kitchen, and a little fireplace with books in it… No, of course not. That’s stupid.”
He looked upset with Jemima. She knew he wasn’t. It was simply the way he spoke.
…
“One day, I tied her hands over her head with my belt. It wasn’t a real knot. It was more of a fantasy knot. She knew she could free her hands easily if she wanted. She got sooo excited with that shit! You can’t imagine. She started asking me to tie her up, to spank her, to whip her with the belt… It was wild!”
He looked disapprovingly at Tace, who was pretending to whip somebody. Then they both started making whipping noises and laughing at each other.
“But the thing is,” Briar said, putting his feet closer to the fire, “she would get a kick out of those things. She loved them. They were okay for me, but for her, they were a must!”
Briar took a deep breath, paused briefly, and looked at his friend, who sat with his eyes closed and his arms crossed over his chest, looking as though he were asleep.
“I’m listening,” said Tace. “Please continue.”
“The worst part,” Briar continued, “was that every time we did it on the couch, I would see the books in the fireplace. I’d get distracted, and I wouldn’t be able to come.”
“Why didn’t you go to her bedroom?” asked Tace.
Briar shrugged. “We did sometimes, but she loved being fucked on the big sofa, looking out the window, hoping a neighbor or passerby would see her. I can put all these things together now, but at the time…”
Briar paused for a long time. Neither of them spoke. They stared pensively into the fire.
“A few weeks later, we started doing it in the pool. A short fence separated her backyard from her neighbor’s. We’d go out at night and fuck in the pool. Sometimes the neighbors were in their backyard. We’d do it anyway. Quietly, but we’d do it.”
Briar closed his eyes, then opened them. “The first day we did it in the pool was also the day I noticed the books weren’t in the fireplace anymore. I don’t think she actually burned them, but they were gone. I never asked her what she did with them.”
…

“You know,” said Briar, “I don’t think I’ve ever told you about Xiomara. Have I?”
Jemima looked at him and shook her head, trying not to interrupt her friend’s train of thought, hoping for a juicy story.
“She was a very attractive petite woman. Kinda wild in bed,” said Briar, closing his eyes to remember.
“Please stop with the faces! It looks like you’re reliving your encounters with her.”
“I loved her skin. It was the most beautiful skin I’ve ever touched,” he said, his head tilted upward, his eyes still closed.
“I’m sure she was pretty. All your women are.” There was a tinge of jealousy in Jemima’s voice.
“And her lips… her lips!” Briar was being extra, playing on the jealousy he had detected. “Did you know that the tongue and the vagina are made of the same skin cells?”
Looking away, Jemima said, “Of course. I had to learn human biology to become a psychoanalyst.”
“Come on, Thinker Bell, you didn’t know that. I just made it up!”
“Did you?”
“No, it’s true. But now we know you didn’t know!” He laughed.
“Tell me about the books,” said Jemima, trying not to look humiliated. “Why would she have books in the fireplace? Did she use their pages for kindling?”
“I don’t know. I never asked her.” Briar stared past his friend, lost in thought.
“I do know that the day the books were gone, I started…” Briar paused, embarrassed, trying to find words that would complete the thought without sounding crass. “I started climaxing again.”
“Because of the books?” asked Jemima, incredulous.
“I don’t know if it was the books or just a coincidence. But the day the books were gone was the day I started enjoying sex again.” Briar hoped there would be no follow-up questions.
Jemima smiled almost imperceptibly. “That’s great. You were able to enjoy your relationship with her after that. That’s important.”
“That day,” said Briar, “was also the day she broke up with me. I never saw her again.”
“I’m sorry to hear that, Briar,” said Jemima in her professional voice.
“It’s okay. Thanks,” Briar replied, making an effort not to look sad.
“I had many chances to feel how soft all her skin cells were… with my tongue!” said Briar, looking at her very seriously.
Jemima opened her mouth to say something, but Briar laughed.
“Very soft, if you must know!”
Brushing him off, Jemima asked “As soft as the inside of the cocoon?”
“Maybe,” Briar looked her in the eye, “What do you think, Doctor?”
Smiling, she said “Touché. But if you are curious to know, I can tell you how I think the two episodes intersect in your life. As a professional, not your friend.”
“You are seriously going to do that?” Briar was surprised; she’d never crossed that line, and that’s why he felt comfortable talking with her.
“Sure. Please, tell me, Doctor.” He was sarcastic and curious.
“No,” she said. “You need to find that yourself for it to be beneficial. That’s what a psychoanalyst would tell you. But I’m your friend.”
“I think,” Briar said slowly, “the empty fireplace and the breakup are connected somehow. The books aren’t there anymore, and neither is she. I feel like it’s something along those lines.”
“There’s only one way to know, Briar,” said Jemima.
“What way?” Briar was genuinely intrigued.
“Make an appointment with your therapist!” said Jemima, laughing.