Kink

by Kink- Stories (retail) (epub)

  * * *

  The next afternoon, as I carried my letter to the post office, I felt something on my neck—the sensation of Maxa’s gaze. Though she was decades past, I flinched and reached up to smooth the hairs that had prickled there. I turned. It was a bright, matte day. The sky was the color of strangulation; the streets glittered like crushed glass. Beneath them, New York’s creatures teemed and strutted like they’d all been loosed from their circus.

  Then I saw her face, looming up from the cover of a magazine. The vendor who was selling it smiled toothily when I handed over my money.

  At home, I spread the magazine open on the table. “I Am the Maddest Woman in the World,” the headline read, and what followed was a first-person account of what Maxa perceived to be her life. I read that she had returned to Paris after her time in the country, and about the series of doomed love affairs she’d carried on then. One man, a Paris businessman, had made her line the walls of her flat with black velvet. I pictured her on the bed, curled up there, like a tiny brooch at the bottom of a jewelry box. She had, it seemed, returned to the Grand-Guignol for a final performance, in which she screamed so loudly she ravaged her voice, and could now do nothing but whisper. The article did not mention me, except for a single reference to the “degenerate women” she had power over.

  My lover read the article over my shoulder, her breasts grazing my back. She did not speak as I flipped the pages, only huffed a little through her nose when she arrived at certain lines. When it was over, and I set the magazine down on the table, she said, “Come, my little degenerate, let’s go for a walk.”

  When I didn’t move, she slid her fingernails along my scalp and gripped my hair at its base. When she gently pulled my head back, she delivered a kiss to the naked arc of my throat. I felt a spasm of joy.

  “Now, Aisha,” she said into my skin, her voice acid and sweet, and my skull vibrated with my name. I stood and followed her into the street.

  The Voyeurs

  by Zeyn Joukhadar

  The Peeping Tom had left a pair of gray men’s briefs under the sugar maple behind the house. The underwear lay rumpled across the fresh crust of snow, the kind of crust Omar loved to watch Belén crunch with her boots when they went out for their morning walks. It was a Sunday. These walks had become a daily ritual, even in January. On their first date, Belén had told Omar that winter was the most beautiful thing about New England. She loved the unspooling aloneness that walking in the snow made her feel. Omar had been nursing a bitterness toward Connecticut when they’d met, an undigested resentfulness about staying put after his divorce, but Jordan was happy in his school, and he’d made friends here, which allowed Omar to withstand the judgmental silence of his neighbors, who had known his ex-husband and gawked at his transition. A little more than a year after his divorce, he’d met Belén. The winter he really wanted to escape, Belén had suggested to Omar after a few dates, snug inside a corner of the town’s only coffee shop, was the winter of other people’s eyes.

  Belén used the rubber toe of her boot to kick free the frozen curve of the briefs, a cotton mélange with a thick brand-name waistband. The waistband was stiff with frozen sweat, weighted down by it in the snow. She said, I told you there was somebody out here last night.

  Omar looked up at their bedroom window. The briefs must have been slipped off on purpose; the peeper wanted them to know they had been watched. The night had been exceptionally cold. The wind would have pinked the tip of the erection—with the exception of Omar and Belén, this was a white neighborhood—the voyeur would have puffed his way, red-faced, up into the maple that held the old tree house, its boards mossed and warped with age. The watcher must have felt the planks groaning in the dark.

  They debated. Omar wanted to trash the underwear—they were an eyesore on the snow—but Belén was disgusted by the idea of touching them. In the end they left the briefs where they were and went inside to run a bath. Jordan was upstate this weekend—what would he have done for child care without their chosen family these past few years, Omar thought, my God—so he and Belén had a chance to reconnect, a chance to see where their bodies might take them with a good night’s sleep and fresh sheets on the bed. Omar found he was relieved to not have to explain the appearance of the briefs to his child. Soon Jordan would be older, he would ask questions.

  Belén unwound her red scarf from her hair and shook it out while Omar filled the tub. How he’d used to love to watch her undo her hair the first few times they’d undressed each other. Belén had been partial to braids during the early part of her transition, had dressed up her dark curls with velvet headbands and butterfly clips. Every trans person has a second adolescence, she’d told Omar: We have another chance to get it right. These days she wore her hair down, tucked into her coat in the winter to keep her neck warm, and she tied it up now into a bun. She got into the tub with Omar, and he maneuvered himself between her legs to rest his head on her chest, letting the kelp of his pubic hair sway. Belén took the strawberry-shaped sponge and daubed at his scars, the still-raw spot under his armpit where a keloid was forming, the hardened patch beneath one nipple where the incision had dehisced. He’d had to slather medical-grade honey on that spot for weeks, until the white pus spat out the knot of a surgical suture, fine as fishing line.

  Since his top surgery, bathing each other had been their most reliable intimacy, often their only one. Belén had been the first to identify his postsurgical depression. She’d had a bad bout of it herself, years ago, after a hernia operation. Of the days immediately following his surgery, he remembered Belén’s hands most: her hands squeezing the blood from his drains, her hands lifting a glass of water to his mouth. He had always loved her hands. After they’d slept together the first time, he’d seen her in the Price-Rite on Main the following afternoon and thought, the blood surging between his legs, Those elegant hands were inside my body. Omar had missed fucking Belén in these last weeks, but it wasn’t quite the sex he missed, or maybe it was another kind of missingness, less a lack of intimacy and more the anticipation of something he hungered for, like a first invigorating run after a period of rest.

  Intimacy was what he’d missed most during his postpartum depression, after he’d given birth to Jordan six years ago, and that was how he was able to differentiate this kind of missingness from the many kinds of human missingness he’d learned to live with since his transition, the missingness of privacy and safety chief among them, along with his faith in the kindness of strangers. Belén was the one who’d taught Omar to forge a life from this new reality—no-nonsense, double-Virgo Belén, who hated when people apologized to inanimate objects (Cis people apologize when they bump into a table but not when they bump into me, she would quip, explain me the sense of this), the Belén who found him a new route home from work to avoid the speed bumps that worsened his dysphoria. When he’d wanted to lock himself away from the world, she had managed to get him up and out of the house. Last summer, his dysphoria at its peak, their walks had carried Omar through one of the darkest periods of his life. One evening they’d come across a family of turkeys in the woods, and he and Jordan had hushed while Belén pointed out the mother fluttering up into the low branches of a beech tree, followed by the fluff of each of her chicks. The mother turkey spread her wings and gathered her babies into her body until they disappeared under her feathers for the night. It reminded her of a picture of the Madonna that hung in her parents’ house when she was a girl, Belén said, Piero della Francesca’s Virgin of Mercy, all the sinners gathered like chicks beneath Mary’s blue mantle. In the tub, Omar turned his head, wanting Belén’s eyes on him. He had never stopped wanting her—the wanting pulsed under his skin—he only had to find the way back through the gate of his desire.

  She kissed the top of his ear. The bathroom window was shut, but the curtains were open to let the light in. Omar wanted to say something about the Peeping Tom but didn’t want to upset Belén. Beneath that feeling was another feeling, the sinister sens
e of being watched, a discomfort they survived by forgetting. He didn’t want to make Belén remember it.

  Do you think it was the Harris kid, Belén asked.

  It was plausible. Mitchell Harris, the neighbor across the street, had a kid in high school, and everyone knew Mr. Harris used his connections to shield his son from the consequences of his own mischief. Mitchell Jr. had been caught setting fires in abandoned factories; driving drunk; once, driving down Rosemont with his friends in his father’s Audi, the kid had shouted a slur at Omar as he walked home from the store. But why should it be him? The whole neighborhood had made it clear that Omar and Belén weren’t wanted, and it could have been any of them, really, or their children, to make it known.

  Whoever it was, Omar said aloud, I’m sure he didn’t see anything. He stroked Belén’s knee. He wanted to make her forget. He wanted to say that he, too, had begun to enjoy the aloneness of the snow.

  The housing market will be better in the fall, Belén said. She took her hair down and let the water darken the curls. We could talk to a realtor, cariño. We could look for something else.

  But Jordan, Omar said, wincing at the whine in his voice, he walks to school, he has his friends, it took years for him just to sit with other kids at lunch.

  He’s a kid. Belén wasn’t looking at Omar; she directed her voice into the sponge as she soaped her dimpled thigh. Kids adjust. Didn’t we adjust, she added at the end, and her voice caught there. Omar knew she was thinking of the year they’d spent in New York, of the dreams they’d had for a new life in that studio apartment, and also of the man who had followed them home from the subway that first winter, the one who had jerked off on them on the R on their way to work the next morning. He came all over the wool coat Omar had given Belén for her fortieth birthday, ruining it. Belén had made a strangled cry; nothing like that had ever happened to them on the subway before. It was the strangeness of her voice that snapped Omar to attention. He’d tried to punch the masturbator, but the man had run off with his dick bouncing. Perv, the man had shouted from the platform, tr—

  Everyone in the subway car had squinted their eyes at the cum on Belén’s coat as though she’d ejaculated on it herself.

  * * *

  Omar tried not to look toward the back of the house when he went outside to check the mail, the warmth of the bath still on him, that clean feeling. Mr. Harris was outside when he got to the mailbox, jiggling the lock on his own front door, his phone on his shoulder. It was colder now than it had been at dawn, and the sky was a smooth, threatening white. A drift of snow had piled up against the beige siding of the house, and Mr. Harris kicked the powder from the tops of his slippers. He clutched the Sunday paper under his skinny arm, bulked by the looping knit of a fisherman’s sweater. Harris was a white man in his early sixties, fat around the middle, his red cheeks and the tip of his nose peeling from a constant sunburn. Most days Omar saw him in his crisp navy suit and camel car coat, sporting sunglasses and leather driving gloves, though as far as Omar knew he only worked in Hartford, in upper-level management at one of the city’s insurance companies. There was a perpetual haughtiness in his posture that, mixed with a stoop in his shoulders and a briskness in his gait, reminded Omar of an Italian comedian whose films he used to watch with Belén. Fantozzi, that was the character’s name. Mr. Harris fighting with the lock brought to mind the tragicomic Fantozzi, the scene where he suspects his wife of cheating with the baker, the way the narrator takes voyeuristic pleasure in watching Fantozzi open cabinet after cabinet of stashed bread, the wretchedness with which it all dawns on him. That scene had always made Omar sad, or maybe it was the shame of watching more than sadness.

  Omar called out to his neighbor from the mailbox. Mr. Harris startled and looked around before answering, as though Omar had shouted an obscenity. He’d locked himself out of his house, Mr. Harris said after a moment. His wife was away on business, he’d have to wait for the locksmith. He said this in a hurried way, as though Omar were intruding. It’s cold out, Omar called back, you can come and wait inside if you want.

  He regretted this as soon as he said it, but Mr. Harris wouldn’t be there long, and anyway he was an ordinary cis man with ordinary cowardices; he wouldn’t dare say anything in Omar’s own house. Mr. Harris didn’t come right away, and when he did come he came reluctantly, picking his way through the snow in his slippers like someone’s aging father. Unsure of himself, he hesitated ten feet from Omar. Belén was at the upstairs window. She wouldn’t come down, Omar was sure, but when he got inside, there Belén stood in the kitchen doorway in her pajamas. Mr. Harris sat down at the kitchen table. Omar put a rakweh of coffee on the stove.

  Belén and Omar had crowded the small kitchen with bits of themselves: evil eye charms, the silver ayat al-kursi plaque Omar’s parents had bought them from their last trip to Lebanon, the avocado pits that Belén speared with toothpicks and left to sprout on the counter in the sun. They’d put a playlist of queer R&B on Belén’s phone while making breakfast, and a song pulsed now, warm and slow. Mr. Harris wrapped his sweatered arms around himself like a cornered bear. They made small talk—Jordan was away for the weekend; work often took Mrs. Harris to Phoenix; had Omar ever been to Arizona (he hadn’t); his wife liked the desert, but Mr. Harris was afraid of going too near the border with Mexico. All the while Mr. Harris avoided Omar’s and Belén’s eyes, and after a while Belén drifted away into the living room without saying anything, cracked open the door to the screen porch, and lit a cigarette. Mr. Harris kept glancing up and down Omar’s body, lingering around his chest and his groin. At first, Omar pretended not to notice. It was a compulsive kind of looking, one that cis people indulged in when they believed they could do it without being seen, though it was so common to catch them looking that their lack of shame was obvious. Omar poured coffee for them both, but Mr. Harris sipped from his cup without looking Omar in the eye, not even when he sat down at the table across from him. Omar thought now of the times he’d caught his neighbors watching him, not only Mr. Harris but nearly all the families on the block, that crawling feeling of being stared at from a curtained window, the way Omar had convinced himself he’d only imagined he’d felt it. Sometimes it was subtle like that, but mostly it wasn’t. The week before, Belén had driven Omar to the leather shop forty minutes away to buy him his first X-harness. He’d wanted one for so long, had fantasized about the way it would feel to slip it on like armor over his scars. The first two months after Omar’s top surgery, they’d both worn pajamas around the house, had gone out only for groceries and to walk Jordan to school. That day, Belén had dressed up, though: a pair of black overalls and a body-hugging turtleneck in maple red. They hadn’t noticed the two cis girls at first, the giggling and staring, and Omar had tried to assume they were pointing at the row of butt plugs across the room, or to the leather-upholstered spanking bench. But there was no mistaking it. What the fuck is their problem, Omar had said, all the sex in this shop and they can’t find anything better to stare at? But then it was irrational to be so upset, he thought; he had always managed to stuff this anger down in public, because after all it didn’t do any good to glare back at cis people, they never lowered their eyes. As with animals in confinement, there was no shame or danger in staring. Mr. Harris didn’t know that Omar had learned this, and most likely he would never know, but the anger grew in Omar, and the smallness of the kitchen pressed on him as Mr. Harris stared at his body, unflinching, as though they were not really in this room together. On the screen porch, Belén spoke Spanish on the phone to keep Mr. Harris from eavesdropping. The table was small, forcing Omar and his neighbor to angle their bodies to keep their elbows from touching. Omar caught a whiff of sweat on the collar of Mr. Harris’s sweater, a primal smell he recognized without being able to explain, and then the locksmith’s truck pulled into the driveway across the street, and Mr. Harris darted out the door, clomping across the crusted snow in his slippers.

  * * *

  The tension rem
ained in the house all through the daylight hours, and for most of the day neither of them spoke. When it was getting dark, Omar soaped the day’s dishes. He let the water run—it took a while to get it good and hot, the water heater always labored in the winter. A twitch had started at the base of his shoulder, a trembling that ran all the way up his neck and into his jaw, where he’d clenched it. The red light was fading on the ice in the backyard. Omar massaged the tightness out of his scars, and lightning shot through his left nipple. It was a good sign, his surgeon had told him at his last follow-up, a sign of sensitivity returning, of nerves reconnecting. In order to feel pleasure again, he had first to feel pain.

  When there was no longer enough light to see the frozen briefs, Omar went into the bedroom and found Belén propped up on a pillow, reading. With the dark a different kind of tension had crept up on him, the knowledge that tomorrow Jordan would be back and this moment, which the shadow of Mr. Harris’s presence had squandered, would be replaced by another moment, another day’s panicked concerns. Omar crawled into bed and curled himself around Belén, who stroked his hair as she read. Stupid, Omar thought to himself, you’ve wasted this day, you’ve wasted your time together.

  I had to invite him in, Omar said without meaning to speak. He wouldn’t have done the same for us, it’s not like I don’t know that, but what am I, a fucking monster? It was freezing out. Belén looked at him over the spine of her book. He looked at me like an animal, Omar continued, even in our kitchen drinking our coffee he still wanted to know if I had a dick. It’s like it turns them on to make us feel like meat.

  Belén brushed the back of his hand with her fingers. Baby, she said, I know.

  It wasn’t the first time they’d had this conversation. Early on in their relationship, there had been no gay bar in town, so Omar had taken Belén to a straight bar vouched for by a friend, a place that was supposed to be safe. The men’s room was a onesie converted into a stall, two urinals crowded by the door. Omar had just pulled his pants down when the door slammed open. What the fuck is going on in here, a man had yelled, slurring, what the fuck is going on? He planted his body between Omar and the door, trapping him inside. Omar held the stall door shut by its flimsy chrome lock. The music in the bar was too loud to shout for help. The thought had crossed Omar’s mind—more an image than a thought—that if this man raped him here it would matter to no one, they would say his body had provoked the attack. He’d been frightened by the ease with which his mind shifted to calculate his chances: which was the sharpest fingernail he could drive into an eye; if he offered to suck the guy’s cock Omar might get the chance to bite once, hard, and run. Please, God, Omar prayed, please, God, please, but there was no rest of the prayer, only a desperate plea not to die on the floor of this dirty bathroom. As Omar was thinking of this, the man’s voice had changed, so that he growled his refrain with what was almost pleasure, no longer pounding on the door but grabbing and tugging at its lock as if it were a belt buckle. The guy was getting off on it, Omar realized; he was getting off on trapping him in here, on the fear he could smell from the other side of the stall door and from the tremor in Omar’s hands that shook the lock. The man unzipped his fly, taking his time to choose the urinal visible through the gap in the stall door. He wanted Omar to see his dick, to watch its pink softness when he shook the piss off the head, to remain frozen in that filthy bathroom after he’d left, after the door had slammed.