She imagines being on a boat alone with Jeff. You know, I’m not really into fish, she says.
Really? Jeff seems excited about the challenge she presents. It’s very healthy. And it’s not that hard to cook. You ever gut and scale a fish before? What you do is, you lay your fish down on a nice flat surface. You get a butter knife, and you grab her tail in one hand, and you scrape those suckers right off. Slow, toward the head.
Uh-huh, she says, breathing hard through her nose.
And then, Jeff says, you have to gut her. You need a sharp knife, you make a cut, right in her belly, and you slice right up toward her head. Reach in and pull the guts right out. And then you go up into her neck—now Jeff is miming, opening an imaginary cavity with one hand and pinching with the other—and you grab her gills with your fingers and slice ’em right off. And then—
I’m so sorry, she says, cutting him off, throwing down her cigarette and crushing it into the gravel with the heel of her sandal. Thank you, that was very educational, but I have to—
She hurries back into the cabin. From the window, behind the shades, she watches as Jeff stands alone, for a moment, then shrugs and turns to walk up the hill, to the little house where he lives. Then she darts into the bathroom and dry-heaves into the bowl of the toilet. She flushes, walks into the kitchen, and makes another drink, looking anxiously out the window, waiting for time to pass.
* * *
The first time he slept with a woman who asked him to hit her, it felt like a window had opened inside him. He’s not sure what happened, exactly—that she saw something in him and touched it, or if the thing in her was so powerful, it moved the thing in him. All he knows is how it felt—where there was blank space, a rupturing.
The man is driving back now, the sun setting. He has been gone for some hours. He feels lightened now, and at ease, in motion where it best suits him. When he leaves a room, he leaves it completely. He is like this at parties, restaurants, his day job. Today he got into the car and drove into town and, like a curtain falling behind him, the rest of the world dropped away. In the trunk of the car is pasta, some vegetables, a bottle of wine, some cheese. He went grocery shopping and for a walk through the town, browsing through the one bookstore, the antique shop, picking up the knickknacks and turning them over in his hands. He almost bought one—a small porcelain dog. He’ll go back to the house, where she is, and they’ll make dinner, and then they’ll make love.
* * *
When he pulls onto the property, she is standing there, a peroxide blonde smoking in the driveway. It is dusk; everything is shades of blue.
Where did you go? she asks. She seems near tears. Why would you do that?
Do what? he asks.
Leave without telling me, she says.
But I came back.
I wasn’t sure you were coming back.
He sighs. He is unloading the groceries from the car. I just wanted to get some things for dinner, he says. We didn’t have anything left. He pulls down the lip of the bag to show the long, deep-green neck of the bottle. I got you wine, he says.
That was nice of you, she says thinly. I still can’t believe you did that.
Was it really so bad? he asks.
She follows him into the cabin. She wonders if Jeff has heard the crunch of gravel, heard the man coming back.
The man turns on the stove.
Yes, it was! she says. It was bad! I was alone, and I was anxious, and you took the car. The only thing we have to get out of here. I felt trapped. You trapped me here, she says accusingly.
He puts on a pot of water to boil, shakes salt into it. You need to calm down, he says. Please. I’m not going to go anywhere.
But how am I supposed to know, if you keep leaving? she asks.
The man turns to open the bottle of wine. I don’t know, he says. She is surprised to see the expression on his face. He looks angry, stricken. I wanted to do something nice for us, he says. There’s no reason to be upset. I don’t see why you should be making me feel bad.
I’m not trying to make you feel bad, she says softly. I just want you to understand how you made me feel.
* * *
Pitch dark again, in the woods just outside of Bristol, Vermont. One light on in the cabin, a lamp beside the bed. She is tied to the bedposts by her wrists with a red rope. They are talking, in a way. She is naked. Under the golden light of the reading lamp, her stomach looks soft, like caramel. The man is naked, too. Their bodies are very close together. He touches her cheek, kisses her on the mouth. Her hands tied, she sighs in response.
He will be attentive now. Gentle.
Tell me, he says, his hand cradling the side of her face. Tell me what you want.
I want to trust you, she says.
She begins to cry. She is so fragile. She can feel her heart opening, and she does not believe he deserves it. It feels as though he is breaking something in her that has repeatedly been broken.
This is what he has wanted, isn’t it? To force the quiet, tight bud to blossom. He has done it with peonies before, cut too soon in the season. He sees it now, the flower opening inside her. The hard, pale green outer shell unfurls to reveal a series of delicate petals, thin as tissue, all different shades of pink, the edges frilled. All of the layers opening, turning back to reveal more and more delicacy of all colors, densely packed, the edges of the petals like little curling tongues.
And he knows now that he cannot turn back. That he is responsible for this, for her, for making her think that she could trust him, that she could open her heart to him. And he realizes now that he has not stopped to consider, at any moment, the shape of his own heart, if it is a flower or a lock or a door, and if it is a door if that door is closed or open.
* * *
They are driving back to the city now. Feeling tender. Let’s ditch this small town and go to the city, my dear, the man says jubilantly, pulling out of the driveway. Bright lights. They have left the keys on the kitchen counter. The sheets are stained with their sex. His hand is idly on her thigh again, while countryside zooms past.
Her heart, all of her, feels gutted and pure. She knows that a shift has taken place inside her; she can feel it. She will try. She knows that it is not safe, that it is never safe. But she is here, now, alive in the world, and there is so much to see. Streaks of green and gold. The road curves before them. She feels drained and content, like she has been crying for days and run out. No longer suffocating under the weight of inarticulable feeling. Though that’s not to say that she has words for how she is feeling. Simply that she understands that she must accept it.
* * *
On the freeway, somewhere on the New Jersey Turnpike, the two catch sight of a flock of starlings, a dense cloud of birds peppering the bright blue sky. As they drive, the flock swirls and floats, ebbing into itself, undulating and widening and narrowing to a tiny point, then swelling huge again.
Look, she says to the man. Look.
They see three or four of these flocks, driving back to the city. Each time they encounter one, she wants to press her face against the glass; she wants to stop time. She wants to ask him to pull over on the side of the road so she can float up into the sky with them, too.
How do they move like that? he wants to know. And what is it called? They look it up. It is hundreds of starlings moving in something larger than individual units. Emergent properties. A system. The name for it is murmuration. It happens because each bird moves in response to the birds around it, in a ring of seven, all tightly connected, instinctively rippling in response to something sensed on the other edge of the flock.
How can it be learned? How can it be choreographed? She considers it, sitting next to him, who is with her but soon will be leaving, though she doesn’t know it, how little time they have left. She considers her own instincts, and then the instincts of all living things, all that animals know without being told.
Safeword
by R.O. Kwon
After some discussion,
they decided they’d both benefit from professional guidance. It was like doing yoga, they figured. Hazardous, at first, to go through the poses without an instructor’s help. The woman who opened the door was shorter than her pictures had suggested she’d be. On her website she’d been dressed in black pours of single-piece latex; now, in a buttoned white shirt with rolled sleeves, a simple black skirt, and calf-high boots so shiny Paul could see his blurred reflection, she looked less like a Mistress Ava Adamson than she did like a normal person, almost.
“Hello, Paul,” she said. She took his hand in a predictably strong grip. Dark hair cupped her jaw, the tips curving under her chin like a gladiatorial helmet. She was roughly their age: still young, as opposed to young, period. “And you,” she said, turning to Jihyun, who was standing half a step behind him, her hand in his. “I’m so glad to see you. Come along.”
She turned and left them. Still holding hands, they followed the dominatrix. Down the long hall, then they were in a dim room with flashing mirrors and—contraptions. Everything was an elaborate variation on something else, something he understood. A black padded massage table, but sturdier, buckle restraints hanging from its corners. A cross, but X-shaped, also dangling restraints. At the end of the room, something like a throne, high-backed, theatrical, gilded, the center of its seat cut away. Then what looked like a cat’s scratching post, except that it was human-sized, and, again, equipped with restraints. A mess of whips and crops, canes and paddles, lined the walls. Jihyun’s grip on his hand had gone loose.
“May I take your coats?” the dominatrix said, smiling. Tattoos shimmered through the thin fabric of her shirt.
She’d be right back, she said. As soon as the door closed behind her, Jihyun turned to him. Her eyes were wide and urgent. “The envelope,” she whispered.
“Oh, right,” he said, pulling it from his pocket. The website had instructed them to leave their payment—their “tribute,” what the fuck—out in plain sight at the start of their session. “Why are we whispering? Where am I supposed to put this?”
“Maybe on that—that table?”
He smoothed out the envelope and left it on the modified massage table. This woman was making more per hour than most bankers he knew. Jihyun was hugging herself, looking down. She’d agonized that morning over what clothes she should wear, which was pretty funny, since, as he’d pointed out, she probably wasn’t going to be in them very long. After five, six outfit changes, she’d ended up choosing the first thing she’d tried on, a slim wool dress with stockings, an ensemble at least fifteen degrees too flimsy for the day. But now, underdressed, clutching herself, she looked tiny, miserable. He closed his arms around her, warming her up. He almost asked if she was all right, but maybe it was insensitive to imply there was any reason for her not to be all right, and why would there be? Here they were, in a dungeon in Chelsea, a dominatrix on her way: What could be off about this? So he kissed the top of her head, the white pure line of her part, and hoped the touch would say what needed to be said, whatever it was. He was so tired, he realized, of not knowing what he was supposed to do or say.
* * *
So much was his fault. Like a jackass, he’d pushed her and pushed her. A month ago, he’d interrupted the back massage he was giving her—“harder,” she kept saying—to ask if there was anything else she wanted to try in bed.
“Jihyun?” he said, after a moment. It was possible she was asleep, but it was even more possible she was pretending this wasn’t happening. They were like two-thirds of a bar joke: he was an ex-Pentecostal, she was an ex-Catholic, and though she’d been with him for three years, she still refused to let him in the bathroom if she was so much as taking a piss.
“Ji-hyun,” he repeated, running a knuckle up the long, knobbed curve of her neck. He was straddling her; she was lying on her stomach in her bra and panties.
“No, I’m fine,” she said. “Thank you.”
“Really, there’s nothing?” he said. “Come on, there must be some fantasy you’ve never told me about. There’s not even one other thing you want to try?” He’d brought this up as a joke, mostly, and also of course because he kind of wanted her to ask him what other fantasies he had, but now that she was being so evasive he had to wonder: Was she lying?
She twisted her neck to look up at him. “Paul,” she said, too gently. “Are you bored?”
“No,” he said. Quickly, before she had time to think, he said, “But you are.”
Then came the denials, the expostulations, the what-the-hell-are-you-talking-abouts, and then, if only to prove him wrong, she pulled off his boxers and bounced on top of him for a long, athletic display of just how bored she was not. But after she’d fallen asleep, her head huddled under his chin, he lay awake, wondering.
A year married, three together. Say they had sex every three days, on average. Once every three days, 121.7 fucks a year, so 365 times they’d played hide the salami, the same stick in the same hole, the stick in the hole, the stick in the hole, the stick in the—who wouldn’t feel bored? The fact that he hadn’t, yet, meant nothing. He was an outlier. Recently, he’d eaten the same lomito every weekday for a month from the Chilean sandwich place next to his office, because it was good. Tasty, filling, reliable. Why mess around? Maybe he should make the straightforward effort and believe his wife when she said she was fine, but now that he was thinking about it he couldn’t, not really. She was so kind to him that she couldn’t be trusted.
Over the next couple of weeks, he brought up the question every now and then, teasing her, and though she brushed him off each time, he shouldn’t have been as surprised as he was when, one night, she shook him awake. It couldn’t have taken long—he slept lightly, fearfully, because anything could happen. He opened his eyes, and Jihyun was sitting cross-legged, her hands folded in her lap. “Fine,” she said. “If you really have to know. I think it’s gone, but it comes back.”
“What?” he said, thinking she’d had a bad dream. It was only when he reached for her hands, her palms damp and electric, that he realized she was crying. “Jihyun, what is it? What comes back?”
“There’s something a little wrong with me,” she said, each word enunciated, as if she were reciting a speech. “You’re going to hate this. Sometimes I really need you to hurt me.”
* * *
The door flung open. Ava swept in, chattering, something about how she’d just gotten back from a trip to Buenos Aires, she’d hitched a ride on a Peruvian cargo ship, it was her new favorite way to travel, then, “Paul,” she said. “What do you do?”
“I work in finance,” he said after a moment, flustered. She was still looking at him, so he added, “I’m a vice president at a fund. It’s too boring to talk about.” This last bit he said with a laugh—it was his usual sidestep, meant to prevent the blank look people got when he mentioned his job. Oh, great, another overpaid bozo in finance. It was a lie, though. It wasn’t boring at all. He loved it, the numbers multiplying, the rush of the transaction, the pure, exquisite logic of the math, all of it at his fingers and under his control.
The dominatrix let her eyes linger on Paul another long moment—it was stagy, her menace; she was an actress who’d said her lines too many times—then she nodded. Turning to his wife, she flashed a smile and said, “I really do love seeing couples. So often, my clients are these lonely guys hiding from their wives. This is so much nicer. Jihyun, I’d like you to get rid of your clothes.”
So he’d been right. He got to think about that, how right he’d been, as Jihyun slipped out of her dress. She stripped down to her panties, a little black cotton thong, but then she hesitated. Thumbs hooked in the waistband, she looked up at Ava. “That’s fine,” the dominatrix said. “Good. Now. Come here.”
* * *
That first announcement of Jihyun’s had felt like a rehearsed speech, he’d realized, because it was a rehearsed speech, a set piece of pure bravado, nearly exhausting what she had to say. That night and over the next few days, he quizzed
Jihyun and as she tried—halting, wincing, tearing up—to answer his questions, it was slow going. Jihyun wanted: to be beaten. She wanted: rules—control—punishment—correction—pain. Ropes. Blindfolds. Whips. Not always, but in the, well, the bedroom, yeah. It could take her all exasperating evening long even to begin to answer a question as basic as, Exactly what kinds of rules do you want? They were both second-generation Americans—his parents had moved from Montreal, which counted—and though they shared the immigrant’s skepticism of psychotherapy, it didn’t take a shrink to guess why she was so shy: what with the nuns, the Catholic boarding schools, the subsequent renunciation of the Catholic schools, the shame, the counteracting feminism, her quasi-Victorian and entirely Korean squeamishness with anything having anything to do with the body, and all this heaped for decade upon decade on top of the great hungry beast of sexual desire—well.
Worse yet, he blundered from the start, asking her why she felt she needed to be hurt. “Why are people gay?” she shot back, suddenly unshy. “Why does anyone have a foot fetish? One of my earlier memories is of looking up words related to—to this, in the dictionary. It just happens, you know?”
No, he didn’t know: that was the problem. His fantasies were confined to, oh, an occasional longing for a threesome. His memory of a certain sixth-grade teacher, the ponytailed Miss Hale. An unindulged appetite for pigtails, and, unoriginally enough, for Natalie Portman. “Is this—something you’ve done before?” he asked her.
“God, no,” she said.
So—his idea—they turned to outside sources. Huddled together on their couch, they watched Belle de Jour and Repulsion. They watched Secretary, and they tried reading Fifty Shades, but soon dropped it; it was so badly written that it made her laugh. Also, they studied a different book, a sort of how-to manual with diagrams, titled Screw the Roses, Send Me the Thorns. (“You don’t like roses?” “Oh, I like roses.”) After closing the book, after switching off the movie, he asked her what she’d liked about what they’d read or seen. (“Do you want us to get a cane?” Head-nod for yes. “Do you… want to have mud thrown on you?” Head-shake for no.)
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