Loving the Amazon

By John Andrew Donix

While making love, twenty-two year old Andy Greenwood falls head-over-heels in love with Melissa, nineteen year old, working-class, single mother. Melissa and Andy are quite simply perfect for each other: young, sensual, deeply connected and hell-bent on erotic union. Their love is frantic and rich and borders on a beautiful perversion. But persistent memories of childhood fracture the bond between Melissa and Andy causing Andy to sacrifice their profound love and travel overseas… only to find himself inveigled in sexual obsession with Polish schizophrenic, Berenice––who turns out to be smarter, crazier and far more dangerous than Andy. The damage performed under her sexual hegemony is as weird as it is powerful... but the sex is mind-blowing. Eventually Andy finds himself morally disintegrating: his sanity unhinging, his sense of self plummeting into sexual oblivion. They fuck, they bite and scratch, they play demoralising mind-games and then, out of the blue, a phone call from Melissa demonstrates just how low he has sunk. From the centre of this moral abyss, his heart breaks…

After ten years estrangement, Andy and Melissa’s reconciliation is divinely erotic. They find peace and love in their resilient sexual union, but Andy still inhabits a moral void. Will he resolve his resurfacing past? Will their inimitable love stand the test of time?

*
In this heartfelt, male answer to 50 Shades of Grey, Loving the Amazon delivers a sexual odyssey in erotic, moving and sometimes confronting detail. Written with complete sensual honesty, the novel awakens the very soul of sex itself: a celebration and a warning to the pornifications of the twenty first century.

According to John Truby, Loving the Amazon is a 'rare combination of raw and poetic that makes all other love stories seem fake'. The novel contains powerful sex scenes and intensely beautiful sentences capturing the joy, the pleasure and the ‘otherness’ of erotic congress.

The novel’s authenticity as lived encounter demonstrates that surviving abuse in parallel to erotic overvaluation challenges the ‘sexual orthodoxy’ of male-centric eroticism. In Loving the Amazon, the ‘male-spectator-owner’ is not merely the protagonist, but a force barely contained in its own questioning. Recalling L’Ecole des Filles (1655) where the sexes becoming one is the highest attainment of erotica, Loving the Amazon is a must read.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris AU
• Release date: Jun 30, 2019
• ISBN: 9781984504418

John Andrew Donix

John Andrew Donix grew up in South Australia where he studied literature at The University of Adelaide and drama at Flinders University before embarking upon a rewarding career in film, television and theatre. He subsequently toured Australia and Asia professionally as a performer of musical theatre. Donix completed his PhD through the prestigious Victorian College of the Arts at The University of Melbourne where he also developed a taste for visual storytelling. His short stories and papers have been published in Australia and USA. Donix strives to empower people whose lives are affected by abuse––always focussing on empowerment, beauty and desire beyond the scarifications of childhood. John currently lives in Spain with his cherished family.

Book preview

PART ONE

CHAPTER ONE

I lay underneath her, a privileged part of her nakedness. No girl I knew before her seemed quite so naked as Melissa, as if this were her preferred or known state of being. She was naked, and I could see into her flesh. I felt her skin and muscles, her fatty deposits, her bladder, her breath and breathlessness, the purity inside her lungs. I was closer to her in that moment than ever to any woman again (save Berenice who took in violence what was not possible in intimacy). With Melissa, I was breathing eroticism—hers. Although I was part of this experience, it was her eroticism engulfing us. She was on top of me, smelling so salty and milky, so very much of love. She was nineteen. I was twenty-two.

In life, she was all gawky and bony, but here in bed, with her breathy timbre of voice, she was sex at the core. And her core was something I never stopped pursuing, though I sure denied it at times.

Fluids of many kinds flowed from Melissa. She was like a confluence of anything human and liquid. And erotic. She had already given birth to a baby boy—another man’s child. I couldn’t care less that this equation didn’t fit with my past experience of what proper turn-ons were supposed to be: those taffeta clad girlfriends for whom affection wooed affection in return, the heady smell of their perfectly combed pubic regions on my fingers, the freckles, the bands of ribbon in perfectly decent hair, the way they stared out at the world, the flicker of perfect non-recognition with the decency to ignore any evidence of my being slightly odd.

Melissa was not one of these; Melissa was a fucking tidal wave. And I soaked her up like a needy animal.

Right then, just moments before I fell completely and utterly in love, she was everything—small breasts budding, that oblique cupid’s smile just an instant away on precious lips. Our few months of lovemaking suddenly exploded like an epiphany between us: how right we were for each other, how a spell had descended within me. On that night, the night I first loved her completely, there were fluids I’d never known. Tears hung from her nose and mingled with salty snot; a pastel-green hanky soaked in eucalyptus oil was tied about her neck. What a fetish this simple knot created. She was naked, pink, and arched. Her breasts were full of mother’s milk, that same milk I’d seen her squeeze into my flatmate Wendy’s cereal bowl the day we met, when I had watched as the two girls enjoyed the taboo Wendy was eating. Yes this was the same mother’s milk I’d seen spilled and lapped up by Melissa’s baby boy, as I tried to understand the mystery of her contented smile. And now, in bed, I pushed my palms up against her, feeling so privileged to draw this close to this thing of beauty—the breast I was permitted to touch. The first beads of that opaque liquid, as milky as come, nestled on her nipples. Another sniff as she softly cried. My mouth was agape, my groin was soaked in wetness, and my cupped hands sluiced sweat from her nymphet arms. Her nakedness was so much softer than mine; like glass, she was liquid with only the appearance of something solid. And now she rolled down on me, her breast, a helium balloon, landing at my lips. I licked. I drank. I shifted her hips about with assuring hands to drink more. She arched again and rocked back, pushing her pelvis over me. Another inch, another. The head of my cock was reaching up inside her, like a baby bird appealing for nurture, sliding in amongst the glorious machinery of woman, the mystery, the practicality of lovemaking, this fluid.

She blew her nose and spat in a tissue; a quick ‘hang on’ flung my way. God, how I loved her for that ease. She was the only woman to tell me that I postured rather than made love—and the only one who cured me of it. But not in this moment. She had emancipated this moment. She had trained me in the art of surrender, and when she tossed that snotty tissue aside, she returned to me. This, in all my years of subsequent adventures (of happily running away from the thing I treasured most), was the only woman who could turn a momentary pause, a complete shift in attention, into an erotic moment by default, then change gear and take the next left into a smile, a gasp, a honeyed trance. For behind her tough working-class facade was a heart of gentle giving.

We drew breath in undiscovered places. Places rich with adventure. Places in the sun. Her room was our haven; her body my reward. I could have crawled up inside her. Her breath was wet and smelled of eucalyptus and rose. Her breath was shortening, and when she came, she flowed. Her breasts erupted with milk and spurted out in streams that induced her laughter. She was liquid. I was aghast, fascinated. And my heart, for the first time in my life, opened. All her pools of flowing succulence flowed on, and I was filled with her—in love. This was like a dream but powered by the tactile fact of her.

Love came with such ferocity I barely recognised it. On what basis was I supposed to recognise something so alien?

And yet here I was in love: divine mystery, dwelling confusion, the questioning. When we kissed, she took my soul inside her. God is the only concept as implosive and fathomless as sexual love.

*

King William Street, Adelaide, early morning. We sank in the bucket seats of my stuttering Volkswagen, this ideal car, the only thing that was truly mine, except for Melissa—though I could not bring myself to own her yet. We relaxed as we swept around Victoria Square whilst the fountain turned like a carousel. The brolgas and swans of that seventies fountain strained against the taut muscles of men, snap-frozen in the granite, who held these escaping birds back from flight. The yellowy light was caught in droplets of water. A few stragglers alighted from the last Glenelg tram.

When I was a boy, this park was full of Aboriginal people, until the Hilton hotel was built and the cops moved them all on. The free-settler tradition was enshrined in this quaint diamond of grass.

The setting ochre moonlight dazzled as it spilled out in subtle refractions. The undrinkable water was said to be connected to the mystery of Adelaide—a mystery which, when flipped over, revealed a creature of a thousand legs, wriggling ineptly on its back. Yet outside the blinkered vision of the average Adelaidean lay a gem so beautiful they need not name it to own it, to bask in its beams, the nightmare somehow seductive, the spell unbroken. Colonel Light’s unwavering vision surveyed our future prospects from his pigeon-crapped statue up on Montefiore Hill, the dark clay disguising our founding father’s unmentionable Malaysian colour. Like all the secrets of the past, Adelaide was slowly slipping by and rejecting me. Or rather, I rejected it, revving up for a clean break interstate. But, as yet still in the grasp of good ol’ Adders, I found myself sinking wholesomely into this little city’s fractured folds, drawing sustenance from her widened streets and ill-fitting manners, the coerciveness of her, the sin, the sheer purblind delight. The fruitfulness of her sexuality was descending on us like a horoscope, animating our sexual parts, and guiding us towards Melissa’s house. There was healing here, if only we could find it.

The morning traffic parked itself around the back lanes of the inner city. Melissa rented the only house in Adelaide that could legitimately be called inner city. Adelaide was its own disappointment, pumped up on the grape of its self-importance, clinging stoically and artily to the clay of its foundations. Some said it had been an ancient Aboriginal burial ground and was rightly haunted because of this. Some said a sexual force which rose from the earth had preyed on the eccentric Englishmen who, having escaped their transgressions under British law, settled here and evoked their perversions anew.

Adelaide—her sleepy charm and clean, wide streets beckoned lazily from her lost position on the gulf. She gave us mother’s milk and smelled of lived-in houses with grand backyards, and I had nestled in the comfort of her, my eyelids dragging downwards, like all the shy, lost boys of Adelaide with pleading eyes, insipid in the extreme and bridled with an abated sense of lust. ‘Give up,’ she’d cry. ‘Don’t run. Stay here, where life is easy.’

*

To be honest, I don’t remember meeting Melissa—she was just there in my share house as if she had always been there. At that stage, she was four months pregnant with her first child. I blustered through the double glass doors into the lounge room en route to the dining room with shopping in cellophane bags, disgruntled and hating all unexpected things in my way. But one of those unexpected things was Melissa, and she struck me like an axe to the head, unnoticed to all but the deeper sensitivities, those little chimes so easily ignored. There she was on the couch, pink and pregnant, miniskirted and smiling.

It seems so ordinary, but something uncanny underpinned our meeting in this wood-darkened lounge room in the centre of this share house in leafy Wayville—something elusive and slippery. I was in motion; she was ever so still, and she laughed. I grimaced (covering). She sat with the ever-fey, ever-smiling ‘lost princess’, Wendy, on our old couch, which smelled of stuffing and musty rosaries. My heart doubled its timpani beat, and—can you believe?—I hid from her. Well, maybe this was the thing love and anxiety had in common. Before we drowned ourselves in sex, before she was my everything, a little bell inside me went ping. You’d like me to say it was her obvious sexual presence, her slender legs, her Sunday-market smell, the fecundity of her little egg-belly bearing child. Well, it was all these and none. She was quite simply arresting in her sweet beauty—a beauty made for me, it seemed, perhaps before I was ripe enough to know. But she was mine to be, and though I despised the thought of sex as possession, in this case I had to admit, even for an instant, that I might have been wrong. Maybe that’s why I could not overcome the arresting nature of her. She was tripping up my preconceptions and stepping into my heart even then. Did she feel the same? My head was not staying for an answer. I tore myself away and stepped through into the dining room, shopping bags cutting into my fingers, and paused out of sight, pondering.

Next moment, Wendy bustled into the dining room, where I stood in the afternoon haze, dust motes floating about like little evils in mirth. She smirked at me, then swanned away, announcing that Melissa preferred sensitive men.

Alone again, I risked another peep. Leaning back on my heel, I peered through the double doors. I saw the prismatic shock of Melissa, broken up in the deco glass design—all eyes and wonder. She watched TV but moved as if called from an elfin world. Aware I was watching, she effected a taller stance and smiled an increment more, her face in shards like a streamlined Picasso, a mauve ‘phase’ of fractured loveliness. Then I realised this was her word; she was quite simply lovely, so very lovely. I sighed. And somehow, over the drone of the television, she turned on and tuned in to me. She faced me. Our eyes, as if under guidance, quelled amidst all wrong and watched each other a moment, in uncanny ease. The rainbows about her face were arranged in neat lines as if within the kidney-pie era of my grandmother. There was a ticking clock somewhere about my soul. I focussed on her violet eyelashes, her pale-blue eyes. Somewhere deep in that gaze was a soul that ticked in unison, a hurt, a pain, a need to unite. An announcement crept up inside me. Note to self: this is ‘she’, I thought, but I was under a fog of denial. Living water was held up to the disappointment of my life. She was an elfin child, all ice cream and silliness. I was a thunderous snake on bird feet. But there would always be those eyes.

Then Wendy crashed back through the banana leaves and tottered hoity-toitily past me, humming out her mocking objection. I heard the twitters of swallows rebounding about the sky. I fought for my perception, as if I wanted to hear Melissa’s breath from the next room and over the television. Then, as Wendy again settled on the couch, I heard them laugh. It’s supposed to hurt just enough (I knew this game), but it did not. Not yet. There was delicacy poised on expectancy within me. Why would such heartrending moments with Melissa always feel so ripe? I stepped away from the adjoining glass door, and in my mind, I stepped right back in and embraced this perfect she. But in my reality, I could not cope with the blood flow, so I retired, with the shopping bags, to the kitchen. Yet there was another side to Melissa—a side my adoring gaze could not capture or predict.

In a trice, Melissa marched into the kitchen from the lounge room and grabbed a banana from my shopping bag, which curiously fouled my mood again, shattering it like glass inside me. She peeled the banana as if breaking the enemy’s backbone and told me,

‘Just fuckin’ calm down, Andy.’

How did she know my name? This laughing pregnant girl pointed out the more ludicrous aspects of my face and didn’t give a shit when I stormed away. She laughed some more between banana-stickied teeth as she tossed select items of shopping on to the floor. I was shocked—foolish despite myself. Didn’t she know there were rules? This was my share house, dammit, and I wasn’t gonna take this lightly even if she was pregnant. But somehow her voice sounded familiar. This ritual of teasing—I knew it like I knew her. There seemed to be a witch’s past in this, our meeting. Never had I felt a voice as melodious, as pugnacious as Melissa’s descend inside me. Her off-the-cuff words were resonating inside my chest, my diaphragm, which quivered with faint I love yous that I hadn’t even thought yet, let alone said. I turned back to her, half losing my motivation, like a dream of being on the stage, fudging through poorly learnt lines. I felt the sun stream in and strike my face. It seemed she didn’t care to see me then. But I knew she was deeper than the game she played. Despite her intoxicating mirth, there was hurt in her. She was staving off a darkness she’d been thrust upon—a child undermined.

I drew a breath, co-mingling dust with marijuana plants concealed somewhere about the house by some secretive flatmate. This scungy house was idyllic now, and so, in that moment, was Melissa’s skinny arse. Her miniskirt was hitched up, her gorgeous legs poised in a battle stance, ready for another attack on my shopping bag. She was an intruder here but seemed as much at home as anywhere. Her breasts rubbed against those cellophane bags and sent a gentle crackle about the room, competing with the strains of violent punk opera, which now blared from Wendy’s stereo, making it pale in comparison, like a migraine.

I felt my head tilt to one side to take her in, like a quizzical dog whose brain had rolled to the left. Melissa was now putting away my shopping. Girls shouldn’t do this, I thought. She wore burgundy that day, the lipstick on her smirk set to match, her red hair slightly clashing, her nose ring sparkling in the sun. The weeds that grew by our kitchen windows reached out to her limply, as I guess, in my own way, I was doing also.

That night, she stayed in Wendy’s room. Her deep affection for other women spilled into a proud bisexuality when she chose. And Wendy’s door closed on another of Melissa’s mysteries.

*

Early the very next morning, I emerged from my own room. I saw her again. The light was frosted. I heard the pad, pad, padding of her feet on wooden floorboards. Slender legs propped up her nightie. Her red hair was tousled. Countless whispers in my head fell silent. Her weeny fists in eyes of morning wakelessness were rubbing through the din of silence. A toilet flush. Silence. A steamy breeze. Melissa’s puckered baby face. A little bud of pregnancy off-centring her. The ‘egg on legs’ they called her—innocence.

CHAPTER TWO

I didn’t know what this image was telling me, but I grew to deeply like her. I watched her. I began to laugh with her. When the child was due, I visited her in hospital and told her she was brave, knowing that I was not. I gazed at her, and she, uncomfortably, even shyly gazed back a moment.

I cannot tell you why Melissa took the form she did. She was simply beautiful, a thing of marshmallow smiles and gawky, cherubic grace, despite her rough manners. She was intuitive where I was cerebral; she was brimming with life where I was driven by will. And despite her being born into a family of takers, she had a natural moral compass which saw her through rocky terrain with a beatific smile. I waited until her baby, Julian, was born. Three months after the birth, I snuck up to her and explained that I couldn’t get her out of my head.

North Adelaide’s overhung trees and nineteenth-century bluestone homes formed a soporific quaintness. Friends were all heading out for a picnic in the sun, but I was struck with a gentle turbulence, a private longing for Melissa.

She was changing the baby’s diaper in an en-suite bathroom, so I offered help. Sunshine slapped against the tiled walls. There was a scent of rosy soap and the ever-present purple and green of Melissa, her Mona Lisa smile about her, her charming insecurity. I helped her with the baby and felt touched. I held his little cloth nappy together and eased the safety pin from her lips. There was a tiny cluck of release between her teeth. This simple ritual seemed to sit so perfectly in both our futures—just two Adelaide rejects finding rightness in each other and a third. Or so I hoped. The baby mewled and gazed like a Buddha, chubby hands seeking his tummy for comfort, a child smelling of sandwiches and teacups whose future was told in the leaves. In this moment, my perfect love and I teased each other with little glances in the toothpaste-splattered mirror. She batted away my appreciation with a scullery maid’s wave. In the mirror, I looked to her as a concrete block descended inside me. I pleaded for this curse of badness to be quelled.

Voices called from downstairs. We had a picnic to attend. Then I blurted out, ‘I can’t seem to … get you out of my head.’

Her response? She smiled and ducked her head, but she offered no confirming glance. Her eyes flitted like daisies then fell to an inward look. Was there something I had missed? She was the tiniest morsel of sad, disconsolate inside herself. She rested a calming hand on her child’s tummy and offered me a non-committal ‘Well …’ She hoicked her child up on her shoulder and said, ‘You’re just kidding yourself, right?’

My jaw snicked shut. The traffic outside grew audible just then. The bar fridge in the bedroom sputtered and gave up. She swung her baby back and forth, patting his bum. Her sweet nineteen-year-old face understood that hers would not be a blissful life; it was a trench filled with the vanity of others. She could trust only herself.

Though I played and joked and fell about the park that afternoon, I was caught in the slipstream of Melissa. That eucalyptus-soaked fetish knot seemed never untied. Her image kept calling me, enticing me further into her mystery.

*

We’d all gone somewhere—out with friends, I think—and went home to the crusty share house, the place we had met. Melissa wore burgundy again that night, and she was her irrepressible, fun self (such fun we had). With that, she replaced everything I didn’t want to face.

I don’t remember where we’d been, but the laughing, working-class boisterousness of her, such convincing cover for her delicacy, had been there, entertaining us all. So here we were, dropped off in the front yard as tittering friends parked the car or put on cups of tea upstairs. I could smell the mulch of this overgrown front yard. I could smell her and her powdered face, though she didn’t need powdering, as her skin was flawless. The sticky lipstick (violet to match her skirt), her nylon stockings hoicked up her skinny legs, and heeled boots that made her even slimmer.

Now this is where you will think me a fool. This is where the confusion of your narrator takes on a complexity you will not like. For despite her loveliness, I was relatively cool. I seemed to have forgotten her inside me. I seemed to be sharing her with the world of ill wisdom. She stopped me here against the alcove of the stairway. She pulled me to her with her breath and uttered a gentle ‘Hey?’ It was ‘Hey?’ in that Adelaide way, which seemed to be both apology and promise fused. That was a ‘Hey?’ I would hear her utter for so many years, and it chimed like a bell inside me, so soothing, so very much her. ‘Hey?’ she said, and I knew in that second that the thing was coming close, the badness inside me, the thing I could not avoid. In my heart, in that moment, I was running. I kept thinking, Not this, not this, to questions and answers unforewarned. The distant night-time traffic stuck to the roads. The plovers were owning the night with their beautiful sounds, gambolling and echoing about, and my heart echoed a tune it had not learnt to sing. Melissa drew me in, and I was scared. She said, ‘Hey. Been thinkin’ about your offer, and … you know, I’m considering …’ Considering what? I thought. But I knew, as young men know when entrapment approaches, that she was wending her way into my softening heart. I stood there in the dark, hoping the shadows would obscure me. I was trying to hide from her, hoping that she might not see the fear (this unnamed fear would take me decades of life lessons to overcome). But now I was free to just be with her, and even in that I was drawn in, held in stasis, like an ambivalent dream, too mesmerised to leave, too terrified to set foot in a trap. I was awakening in some weird way, as if I had found a rope thrown to a mire I didn’t know I was in. She said ‘thinkin’ about your offer’, but she was not thinking about the offer. She had accepted the offer and now was testing whether I could be trusted.

The smell of her white face. The ripple of cool in the breeze. The promise of Melissa, the beauty and honesty in her face and accent, drawing me in. Yet I was fighting with an enemy neither one of us could face. Her fingers toyed about my waist like a ghost-train ghoul, but it was comforting. How strange. I was in doubt, such doubt—the doubt I knew was a dull blade held to my life. But still she stayed, her back against the alcove. And me? Was I stepping into her? Indeed I was, and this would be the first step in compulsion, wounding me like a witch’s fantasy. As she breathed her yes, I felt that little surge of sex in my pants, and my thoughts went all confusing. And in the midst of the battle, the cool, the sound of night, the easing light of alcohol, I pressed myself against her, and our lips came together—so simple, so rewarding, a step