3

by Julie Hilden

  3

  Modern Erotic Classics

  The Houdini Girl

  Martyn Bedford

  The Phallus of Osiris

  Valentina Cilescu

  Kiss of Death

  Valentina Cilescu

  The Flesh Constrained

  Cleo Cordell

  The Flesh Endures

  Cleo Cordell

  Hogg

  Samuel R. Delany

  The Tides of Lust

  Samuel R. Delany

  Sad Sister

  Florence Dugas

  The Ties That Bind

  Vanessa Duriès

  3

  Julie Hilden

  Neptune & Surf

  Marilyn Jaye Lewis

  Violent Silence

  Paul Mayersberg

  Homme Fatale

  Paul Mayersberg

  The Agency

  David Meltzer

  Burn

  Michael Perkins

  Dark Matter

  Michael Perkins

  Evil Companions

  Michael Perkins

  Beautiful Losers

  Remittance Girl

  Meeting the Master

  Elissa Wald

  House of Lust

  Michael Hemmingson

  3

  Julie Hilden

  Modern Erotic Classics

  Series Editor: Maxim Jakubowski

  Constable & Robinson Ltd

  55–56 Russell Square

  London WC1B 4HP

  www.constablerobinson.com

  First published in the US by Plume,

  a member of the Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 2003

  First published in the UK by Black Swan,

  an imprint of Transworld Publishers, 2004

  This ebook edition published by Robinson,

  an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd, 2012

  Copyright © Julie Hilden, 2003

  Series Editor: Maxim Jakubowski

  The right of Julie Hilden to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters,

  places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination

  or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons,

  living or dead, or to actual events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in

  Publication Data is available from the British Library

  ISBN: 978-1-47210-556-1 (ebook)

  Julie Hilden graduated from Harvard, and earned a law degree at Yale and an MA in creative writing from Cornell. After several years of practicing law, she has now turned to writing full time. Her first book, a memoir entitled The Bad Daughter, was published by Algonquin Books, and she has also written for Slate magazine. She lives in New York City.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  My heartfelt thanks to my terrific agent, Harvey Klinger; my wonderful editor, Trena Keating; and the very talented people at Plume Books, including Laura Blumenthal, Norina Frabotta, Brant Janeway, and Lucy Kim.

  Special thanks to Stephen Glass, for more reasons than I could possibly list.

  I am extremely grateful for the kindess, generosity, and skill of those who helped with French publication and translation – Larry Berger, Anouk Markovitz, Pierrette Fleutiaux; and Marie-Catherine Vacher and everyone at Actes Sud.

  A grateful thank-you to all those who read and commented on, or otherwise helped with, the novel, my author photos, or my Web site – B. A., T. B., Pamela Buchbinder, D. B., Maria Dizzia, Henry Dunow, Hampton Fancher, Jason Furman, Russ Galen, Eve Gerber, Michael Glass, Susanna Green, Brandt Goldstein, Mohsin Hamid, Lisa Hamilton, D. K., Geoff Kloske, Dahlia Lithwick, Joanne Mariner, Jessica O’Connell, F. P., Garth Patil, Josh Pashman, C. P., Gretchen Rubin, Melanie Thernstrom, W. T., K. W., Amy Zalman, and Seth Zalman. Thank you also to my colleagues at FindLaw.com, Diahann Reyes and Kent Williams, who were unfailingly kind and understanding throughout.

  Thanks, finally, to the friends who supported me through three long years of writing; to my father; and to my mother, in memory and always.

  Part 1

  It is the first Saturday in August when I walk up to the porch of the summerhouse and see them. I am supposed to be in the city this weekend but my interview is canceled, the actor called out of town. I see them through the fan propped in the window, through the transparent blur of its blades.

  She is moving on top of him slowly, with such concentration that though she faces the window, though she could look right at me, she does not. I am only a few feet away from her. I have never seen her before.

  I watch her glossy brown hair shift on her shoulders, I watch her empty eyes as she moves on him with calculation, with slack lips, with nipples so erect that the areolae wrinkle around them – as she moves with such pleasure, really, that who could hate her in this moment?

  To love her, to want to be her, to want to touch her, yes. But not to hate her, not in this.

  I watch her, and watch, too, a sliver of Ilan’s narrow chest beneath her, its pattern of hair that breaks across his sternum. I can see the necklace sliding on his chest as they move, the tiny silver hand slipping back and forth, its touch faster and jerkier than Ilan’s own smooth caresses – than the touch of his hand moving on her downy back.

  For perhaps five minutes, I don’t say a word. It seems a weird privilege: here is the life I don’t see, the life that goes on without me. I watch them as a ghost watches the living.

  Then I say his name slowly, just audibly. She starts and looks around wildly. When she looks through the fan and sees me, she gasps.

  Ilan does not start at all; not a flicker. But he lifts his head, sees me, and winces, and just like that he lifts her off him and at the same time off the bed.

  ‘You have to go now,’ he tells her.

  She dresses insolently slowly. Her blouse fastens in the back with a line of ties – it is really just a square of cloth that settles on her breasts – and she loops each of the ties into a perfect bow.

  ‘Fuck you,’ she tells Ilan. ‘You fucking liar. I deserve better than you.’ Righteous anger, but controlled.

  She and I brush past each other in the doorway. She is the woman I am supposed to be: a hair tosser, a thrower of water from glasses, a slapper, a terrific girl all told. Dignified, she slips through the high reeds near the driveway and begins to walk along the road slowly, carrying her pretty embroidered shoes. She does not look back at him, at us, at the house for even a moment, because she knows what she deserves.

  It’s as if she’s preempted me with her anger; I want to shout at Ilan too, curse at him, but I don’t have the heart. ‘I should leave too,’ is all I say.

  ‘You can’t leave me, Maya. I love you.’

  ‘Was this the first time – the only time? I need to know.’

  ‘It started in college,’ he admits, ‘a few weeks after I met you.’

  I shiver. I never expected to be chosen by myself, for myself alone. It had felt wrong – unlike me – to be chosen. Now, hearing this, I feel only a sickening familiarity, not surprise.

  ‘It never meant anything,’ he assures me. ‘I felt awful about it. I don’t know where it comes from. I thought, with enough therapy, I’d talk myself out of it. But all I do is confess, I don’t change. Look, can we at least sit down? I feel like any moment, you’re going to leave.’


  ‘Okay, but I’m not promising to stay.’

  I sit down on the rattan couch. He stands behind me. I lean back and reach my head up to him – like a rabbit in a cage straining to sip from its water dispenser, the single round, hanging drop. And he leans down, princelike, to kiss me.

  Then he starts to touch me. He slips his hands down my jeans, his fingers splayed, rubbing my clitoris insistently, with the slightest pressure. I moan quietly, move against him.

  ‘Don’t I know you?’ he says. ‘I know exactly what you want, don’t I?’

  It agitates me as he rubs and rubs, softly, softly. He touches me the way he learned from me years ago – the way I touch myself. He studied it. The detail of his knowledge of me devastates. If I were to close my eyes, I could confuse his touch with my own.

  But as he nuzzles into my shoulder, I smell sex in his hair and break away from him.

  ‘Would you at least shower?’ I demand.

  ‘No, you love that. Tell me you love it.’

  In seconds my jeans are gone, my shirt is gone. He holds on to me, won’t let me leave.

  ‘It’s so soft,’ he says as he touches me. ‘You’re so wet.’

  He gets a little bleat out of me as he rubs. Then I clamp my mouth shut. Ah, but then I relax it. I begin to breathe in the sex smell in his hair; I begin almost to like it.

  ‘Maya. Tell me you want this.’

  ‘I want it.’

  ‘I knew you did.’ And I do. And it is hours, then, before we can stop.

  * * *

  Early that evening, I return to the city alone. As I walk away from our house to meet the bus, I look back and see the fan there in the window, its blades spinning in the same blur. I imagine that again I can look through it and see the girl, moving up and down so slowly, her breasts bare.

  At our loft, I am alone for days – for so long that I feel as if I should be taking a plane somewhere; only plane trips have separated us for this many days before. Ilan calls and leaves messages every day, but I don’t pick up. I only listen to his voice, trying to assess what he says as if I were a stranger, someone objective. I notice that he never promises to be faithful; he only begs to see me. He says he loves me, and he wants me back.

  As I lie on the bed we share, I feel as if my chest bones should be opened like a doored cage, and my heart displayed so that someone can say ‘Enough.’ I cry my mascara off, cry it into black rivulets on my face and leave it that way.

  Then I try an experiment. I kneel on our bed and brace myself against the wall as if I were above Ilan. I close my eyes to visualize his face, imagining the silver hand on its chain shifting on his chest as he strains beneath me. I test, in the most visceral way I can, whether I can withstand his being gone.

  Part 2

  I am nineteen when it begins – a sophomore. Outside the college library, I lean against one of its huge columns, my bookbag at my feet, waiting for my roommate. Ilan, then a stranger, walks up to me and asks, ‘Are you waiting for me?’

  ‘I might be,’ I tell him. I am not much for this kind of flirtation, but today, he brings it out of me.

  Ilan is tall, rangy, narrow-hipped and leather-jacketed, with brown-black hair and dark circles under his eyes. Around his neck he wears a small silver hand on a chain, with a ruby set into its finger.

  I lift the chain from his neck; the tiny hand rests in my palm. The world falls away for a moment. I imagine the figure the hand would belong to: a ruby-eyed god that would curl in the notch of Ilan’s collarbone, a tiny familiar.

  ‘My grandmother gave it to me,’ Ilan says, and touches my arm – the first of a light rain of touches. ‘It’s the hand of God. It’s supposed to protect me.’

  ‘Has it?’

  ‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘It has.’ He smiles.

  ‘Then I wish I had one too. I need the protection,’ I say, surprising myself; I don’t usually admit need, and I don’t even know him. But too quickly for me to protest, he lifts the chain from his neck and puts it around mine.

  The next morning I arrive at his room to return the chain. He answers the door unshaven, a towel around his waist, his hair wet. I take a nervous step backward, and hold the chain out to him.

  ‘I kept thinking I was going to lose it,’ I explain.

  ‘I knew it would be fine, but it’s nice to have it back.’ He reaches to take it from me and fastens it around his neck again. ‘It was the first time I’d taken it off.’

  Ilan asks me to meet him for a drink that evening, and after that we stay up all night, many nights, talking. During this time I, who love sleep, rarely sleep. Ilan calls the resulting state ‘exhaustion ecstasy’ – the relaxation that arises from deep tiredness, the exquisite weariness of every limb and the sailing feeling that accompanies it.

  We’ll outlast everyone else in Ilan’s dormitory room or mine, watching them go to sleep one by one, until they leave us alone with each other. ‘I can’t wait until we can be alone,’ he’ll whisper.

  Or some nights we’ll go to the one café in town that never closes and choose a plush sofa to share, take our shoes off and settle in. I slip my toes into the space between Ilan’s thigh and the couch cushion as we talk.

  Soon I trust him enough to sleep with him. He is my third lover. Unlike the previous two, he reaches me. His voice on the phone revs up my heart instantly, setting it beating fast. In bed he is a revelation, yet also something already known.

  His hair is short and soft, when it seems it should be stubble, should be prickly. I want to touch it all the time. When he is inside me, I put my legs around him, arch my feet, and match the curve of each arch to the curve of the back of one of his calves, fitting us together.

  He goes down on me and says it is like kissing me. He picks a lock of pain and pleasure, of shame and want – waiting patiently as if he were listening for each of a safe’s tumblers to fall into place. When he touches my breasts, he alternates between cupping the entire breast firmly and pinching, with two fingers, each nipple, and I begin to believe I have always wanted to be touched this way. Whether he changes me or reveals me, I have difficulty telling.

  My pleasure is acute and it hurts me to have it. It comes to me on narrow beds in dormitory rooms, or on the desks of closed classrooms we slip into, through windows or unlatched doors, late at night. It comes to me with bark scratching at my back, through my sweater – as I stand for Ilan in the dark in a forest near campus, my skirt up, and he, on his knees, opens me. It comes to me loudly and softly, and all the time. It is something he can give to me, take from me, anywhere. He is the one key that always opens.

  One night he makes me show him how I touch myself. My habit is to rub myself on my palm, facedown. For the longest time, embarrassed, I refuse to let him watch. But eventually I do show him.

  After that, he often asks me to lie facedown so that he can lie on top of me and put his hand under mine as I touch myself, copying the motion. This makes me come in a moment, until I cry with it. It is so exciting simply that he wants to know how to do this, and that I let him learn.

  Ilan loves to startle me out of my stillness, to make me cry out. I begin to depend on him for it. How close can you get? We try to run the body out to the end of its endurance, having sex over and over, as if there is some boundary we are closing in on, but can never touch.

  I give myself over to him and wait for that delicious feeling of falling. But even as I relax, I know there is still a brake in me – like the twitch and jerk of threat that ends that falling feeling in light sleep, rousing me awake. I can feel his palms on me, my back can arch; still I keep that tiny mooring, like the handle on the end of a kite string. That little catch in me: if I lost it, I would lose myself entirely.

  Before I meet Ilan, I live in my mind. I have been this way since childhood: the stillest girl, the one who waits quietly. As a child, I notice that adults forget I am in the room; they talk over my head. Older now, I remain quiet, full of my unrealized wants. Most of the time I do not even begin a thing, b
ecause, even starting out, I can see so acutely its impossibility.

  This is what I desire most in life: a dream platform. There, two people would exist in the same space – as if on an empty white stage – and be able to speak and act with complete candor, enact their true desires.

  Afterward, both people would remember the dream but would not be able to allude to it. They would simply know about it emotionally, with the kind of knowledge you can never put into words.

  Life falls short whenever I compare it to the life I imagine might happen on the dream platform – and so, until I meet Ilan, I barely live at all. I don’t speak in class, and rarely speak elsewhere. My two roommates have lived with me since the first day of freshman year, but they know little about me. They might notice things – I’ll row by myself; I don’t have much money; if men chase me, I always cut things off after a few dates – but I know these traits don’t quite jell into a personality.

  Even my parents hardly know me now. Long ago I stepped neatly out of my family – that is, my families. After their divorce when I was three, my parents both remarried and had other children: five apiece, two broods much younger than I. They are happy kids, brought up that way, as I was brought up in fighting. Now my parents have adopted a sort of willed amnesia about that unhappy, angry time. Good for them, in my opinion: who would want to dwell there? I was all too happy, myself, to escape it – through books, or solitary walks, or simply by imagining myself elsewhere, in some better life.

  I’m my parents’ guest whichever home I go to, like a spinster aunt. I am the mistaken child, the changeling. Half sister to all, sister to none. On the margin of other people’s lives, I am a character who enters and exits, whose disappearance can be afforded, can be borne. I am far from the favorite of either of my parents, nor am I that of any teacher, grandparent, or friend. No one marks me out to say: you.

  And as much as anyone learns about me, I always think there is some deeper privacy in me they can never reach. I delight in thinking shocking things yet betraying nothing, to prove to myself again and again that I will not be known.