Sound

Sex has a soundtrack: noise from outside the sexual space; noises from within.

At the Liberty Inn, traffic on the West Side highway starts, streams past, stops, starts again. Inhuman noise, in the distance, nothing more than a buzz track. The sounds of cleaning in other rooms and in the hallways comes nearer, but still stays outside the door of the room. Only the shock of the call from the desk-clerk penetrates - and usually I am in the shower or dressing by then.

At the Kew, it is common to hear loud fucking from other rooms, as well as the industrial-strength vacuum-cleaners, carpet-scrubbers, and air-circulators that are part of operations there. Listening to others fucking is an uneasy experience; it is hard to know what it is that is being overheard. Real people fucking or a porno-movie on the television? If the fucking is real, are the shrieks and moans nevertheless staged, as in porn? Is she a pro, or someone fucking for pleasure? Over time, both D and I have become noisier, and by now I suspect that others forced to listen to us assume that we are porn actors or faking.

Rooms away from the street at the Seton - I was there fairly recently with D - are quiet, as are off-street rooms at the Herald Square, the Grand Union. These rooms may have clanking or hissing steam-heat, or in summer noisy window a/c units. Overheated rooms at the Herald Square have sometimes to be cooled with a/c if the windows will not open. But still these rooms are typically quiet.

J's apartment: at some times of day the noise of children in the playground of a nearby school drifts in, and it is slightly odd to overhear the play of children while engaged in strenuous adult play. The walls are thin, so we can hear her neighbor's television, and the footsteps of the woman who lives upstairs.

F: the street is quiet, but there is plenty of distant city noise. Here too the walls are thin.

Offices are quiet, but also enforce quiet. Quiet - being quiet, staying quiet - is a deep and complicated topic that I cannot face here; here I am dealing with sound, not its absence.

The soundtrack of car-sex depends a lot on the season. In winter, the engine and heater running, the windows sealed, not much sound penetrates. In mild weather, with the windows cracked, noises of traffic or birds enters. In summer, with the engine and the a/c running, the quiet of winter returns.
What about noise from within the sexual space? At F's, the radio is typically on, tuned usually to WFUV, Fordham's station. The music is nearly always tolerable, and very often good or even great, but we do not listen to it much, and the talk is an intrusion (though a useful time-keeper). With Q at her house, the radio has also been on - again some version of PBS, I think. With F and Q, part of the point of the music is to mask the sounds of fucking. To F, who has a roommate, and neighbors through the thin walls, ceiling, floor, this is a courtesy as well as a precaution, like those white-noise machines that populate therapists' suites, ensuring that everyone can talk with no fear of being overheard. Q's radio serves a similar function if there is someone else in the house who would be puzzled by overhearing sounds of sex. Music as background, not chosen, not listened to, but sometimes noticed, usually with pleasure.

With D (and this was true sometimes with A, back in the days when she and I were still fucking) music is not white noise but integrated into sex itself. This is so especially during MBJs (musical blowjobs) and their close equivalents. The music is not listened to so much as felt; dancing is an obvious comparison. It dictates the rhythm, the tone, the temper of sex. Aggressive, pounding anal sex requires a different soundtrack from slow, feathery lip-and-tongue cunt-teasing.

Beds squeak, creak, bang against walls, often in time with fucking. Desks are sturdy and silent surfaces, as are floors. There are noises from sex itself: the slap of bodies against each other, the liquid slosh of a cock in a wet cunt; grunts, moans, retching. And on top of that, the repertoire of calls and cries that shade over into the full-blown and articulate language of sex-talk, which is not noise at all.

Some women are louder than others. I am very quiet, though when stoned and frenzied I have been known to bellow. D claims that I am loudest in the car, but I think this is partly an effect of the small space. She is at her loudest when sitting on my face. B is a classic 'Yes-woman', punctuating her ascent to orgasm with a series of 'Yes' calls that rise in pitch and volume until she hits the top. Without this feedback it might be hard to track exactly how close to coming she is, though there could be little doubt about the climax itself. It is a sexual response, like the tightening of her cunt around my cock as she approaches the peak - again, not noise at all.