Fucking Daphne

by Daphne Gottlieb

  I was a perfect gentleman, keeping my hand lightly on her elbow to steady her gait, opening the car door for her, never making a move. Not even to ask for her phone number.

  I TAKE DAPHNE TO A PARTY

  I took Daphne to a party. It wasn’t just any party; it was the biggest and most popular women’s sex party on the West Coast. Two floors, countless rooms, packed with women. We were standing next to each other on the second floor, leaning over the railing to watch the women come and go. Most of them were dressed to the nines in their fabulous fetish outfits. I was wearing black jeans. Daphne wore a black knit skirt with white men’s briefs underneath. They were pulled tight across her very generous bottom, one of her best assets. She liked to joke that she was born butt first, and that explained a lot about how she moved in the world. Her favorite kink was spanking. Her second favorite was Daddy/girl.

  I wasn’t Daphne’s daddy, but I would happily paddle that tremendous bottom of hers while she told me made-up stories about daily discipline at her house. Sometimes I was the storyteller instead. Other times I made up punishment games for the both of us.

  I had my hand on her ass, stroking the cotton of her briefs, when the monitor came up and whispered harshly in my ear. “Put a glove on that,” she said. She stepped away before I could respond that I wasn’t doing anything that needed a glove, not yet anyway.

  So instead, I leaned into Daphne’s shoulder. “You got me in trouble with the party staff,” I said in a low voice. “And this isn’t the first time, is it? You’re going to get us kicked out of here before the night is over.” I leaned in to speak low into her ear. “I think you need to be punished.”

  She wiggled against my hand, still under her skirt and above her briefs.

  “How do you think I should punish you?” I asked.

  She looked at me and with utter sincerity replied, “Cookies?”

  Instead of cookies, I made Daphne stand in the corner, holding a penny to the wall with her nose. I still remember her bouncing on her heels, grinning and staring straight at the wall.

  STOOD UP BY DAPHNE

  Daphne showed up for our coffee date in full leather: harness, bar vest, chaps, and immaculate engineer boots. He had a weathered face and a graying Vandyke beard. He looked like everybody’s fantasy of a leather daddy. He even drove a pickup truck.

  I was looking for exactly what he was offering—someone who would make me lick his boots while he spanked my ass, and who, if I was a good girl, would reward me with a cock to suck. A trope, but still a powerful one. More powerful because I wore a female body and he wore a male one. A gay one. Those men, they weren’t supposed to be into women. I wasn’t supposed to ever come within a mile of their boots, much less the bulges in their denim jeans. So when I did, it was a rush of transgressive victory.

  Only I never got near either boots or crotch. We talked about it; I thought there was chemistry. Daphne was interested. He’d played with girls before. He was playing with one now, someone very different from me, a mutual acquaintance, tall, thin, tomboyish, also a dyke. He liked dykes. He liked cross-orientation play. It was queerer than queer, and that was hot. He smiled at me, with an edge to that smile.

  I can’t remember a single specific thing Daphne said. Only the connection, hot and true.

  I gave him my number. I let him give me a ride home in his black pickup, even though there was a voice in the back of my head screaming, Unsafe! He could kidnap me, drive me anywhere; and if not, now that he knew where I lived, he could stalk me if he wished. But he was a perfect gentleman. Too perfect. He never called.

  I learned later that he was carrying on multiple relationships and lying about playing safe. In other words, he was barebacking with one lover and not telling another. I convinced myself that maybe it was a good thing he never called back. A near miss with disaster instead of with ecstasy.

  DAPHNE MAKES A MISTAKE

  Daphne propositioned me by email. She sent it to my work address; I was working at a sex magazine, so it wasn’t inappropriate. She told me I was cute and she wanted to meet me for a drink. She invited me out to the local dyke bar after work.

  When I arrived, she didn’t recognize me, but I recognized her. Years before, I had gone to a party in my black jeans and my black T-shirt and met a gorgeous tranny girl in tight corset, leather miniskirt, heels. She’d made eye contact with me while I was hanging up my jacket, a look I thought was unmistakable in intent. But when I turned to her, prepared to make small talk and maybe more, she looked me over and said, “You’re not really dressed for this, are you?” I quickly made my excuses.

  Daphne didn’t remember me, clearly. But I remembered her.

  This time, she confessed she’d confused me with a coworker of mine. “I thought you were the femme one,” she said. “I like femmes best.” She paid for my drink anyway, and accompanied me to the train station, chattering about Star Trek and separatism as we walked. She gave me her card. I threw it away as soon as I was out of her sight.

  DAPHNE AND I KISS

  We’d spent the entire night on a mattress on the porch, cuddling. Lesbian cliché number one: All we did was hug each other and nuzzle each other’s ample chests.

  The cliché value was actually worse because she was black, I was white, and otherwise we were built almost the same: top-heavy, thick in the waist. For once, I had met someone whose breasts were as large as mine were. We must have made a pretty picture at the party, holding each other on the damp futon mattress, giggling.

  I was sorry, later, that I hadn’t been more bold. I thought, There will be other times. I see her every other month at this sex party, and we know each other’s names; I have her email address already because Daphne always volunteers. On that mattress, I thought, This is so glorious in and of itself. I thought, honestly, that I was being nonlinear and non-goal-oriented and nonpatriarchal and going with the flow. It’s still sex even if neither of us touches each other below the waist, right? And it wasn’t like I had anything to prove. I’d had my whole hand inside a girl or two, more than once. I had sucked plenty of silicone. I’d had the juices of a woman smeared across my cheeks. I’d made her come. And her. And her. And they’d all come back for more.

  The Violent Femmes were on the stereo. I was so much more experienced now, and still I held back.

  I thought, I never want to stop kissing her. Kissing her is glorious. Kissing her is enough.

  I thought, If she wants more, she will tell me.

  I thought, It’s impossible that we’ve been doing this for hours. Surely the party isn’t over yet.

  DAPHNE AND I IN THE DARK

  I treasure this memory the most. I have never shared it with anyone.

  We always had sex in the dark, Daphne and I. Whether we were alone in the apartment, or our mutual girlfriend was out in the living room, or all three of us were asprawl in the bed we’d made by pushing two full-size mattresses together.

  We were living together, all three of us, for the length of a summer lease. In the fall, the students would come back into town, and we’d have to move. We tried not to think of what would happen in the fall. I had just graduated and so had he; our girlfriend had just gone back to school and was halfway through her program. She had finals the week after our lease was up.

  But we’d been spending so much time together, the three of us, that the living arrangement didn’t seem so temporary. We’d been sharing a bed on and off, four or five times a week, for almost a year. Instant household—just add lease.

  Daphne was tall and broad-shouldered and liked to wear eyeliner, but only for special occasions. His hair was chopped on a new-wave angle and dyed maroon. He danced to Nine Inch Nails while howling made-up lyrics—“Chow down on a cone of soft serve; you’re going to get a bad pinched nerve.” Both my girlfriend and I had crushed out on him the very first time we met him. She was the one who suggested inviting him to dinner, at her place, and then dragging him off to bed. I’d been dating her for maybe a month, and then suddenl
y we were a threesome.

  This time he was waking up from a nap. I knew he liked to masturbate a little afterward. I was waiting for him. He had only a thick sheet draped over his body, for it was the height of July in the Midwest, and our apartment had no air-conditioning, only a cooling breeze from the river. Another reason we stayed in the dark.

  I found Daphne with his hand on his cock. Such big hands. I loved to see them work. His legs were spread. I crawled up between them. He looked at me, but didn’t say anything.

  I was greedy. I was thinking of all the times I had come home to find him and our girlfriend behind a closed door, strangely silent. Were they talking or fucking? I thought of all the times I heard them whispering next to me in the bed, thinking I was asleep. How she walked with Daphne every night to get cigarettes from the gas station three blocks away, while I stayed home. This was paranoia, and greed, and a desperate attempt to mark my territory or, at the very least, leave a mark.

  I was going to take what I wanted. I wasn’t going to ask. I lowered my head.

  He hadn’t been inside me, mouth or otherwise, since winter.

  His hands stayed away from me. His hips rose from the bed. The world narrowed to the hollow in my cheek.

  I’m not going away, I said with the motions of my throat. I can outlast you. I will still be here.

  I felt his thighs clench. He touched my hair lightly. “I’m going to come soon,” he said. “You might want to stop.”

  I lifted my head, and there was the proof of his desire, cooling on his belly.

  Daphne didn’t touch me. He didn’t go back to sleep. He got up, took a shower, and went into the living room. To join her. No words were said.

  It was the last time I touched him.

  CODA

  Daphne sent me a postcard that I burned in the sink.

  Daphne stopped calling. I blocked her email address and banned her online ID.

  It took someone saying, “I had lunch with your ex-girlfriend last week” for me to realize that yes, Daphne was now my ex-girlfriend. We had graduated to “just friends” without ever noticing.

  Daphne moved to Bangalore. She let me keep some of her books.

  We had three condoms break in less than two months.

  Daphne met her fiancé soon after that night. She fell deeply in love. It was a joy to see. They’re working on a loft in the East Bay somewhere, turning it into an art space and dungeon. The photographs on the wall are gorgeous. The place will be a delight.

  We tried again, but we never did get kicked out of the party.

  I put that couch I’d slept on so many times out on the curb, but nobody took it. No one would touch it. I had to haul it to the dump myself.

  Daphne is still out there somewhere. Sometimes she brings me a potted plant. We kiss on the porch, even when I have a cold. “I never get sick,” Daphne says. “I’ll be fine.”

  I know, I reply. I remember.

  UPPERCASING

  Charlie Anders

  My name is Daphne Gottlieb. I was born on New Jersey’s very last family dairy farm. My dad had a theory about cows in wind tunnels. I got into Rutgers, but I decided to take a year off to stretch my horizons.

  All my friends tried to tell me San Francisco was over. Yuppie fucked. Go to Austin or Portland instead. But I had a feeling about San Francisco. Maybe it was those big, eager dog heads with the chef hats. San Franciscans preserve those diner-top statues, and any time you carry one of them down the street, a parade just forms behind you. They close the street. Does Portland have dog heads? Hells no.

  I don’t know what I expected when I got to the Sucka Free. A coolness test? An initiation? I was all braced for whatever. Unstoppable. Eighteen years, I’d played nice. I’d germinated in Hot Topic and boat shoes, and everybody called me a good kid. I didn’t want to do drugs, listen to shitty music, or have unsafe sex, like the rebels at Dearly High, but I rebelled on the inside. I saved up my fuck-you-world until it could do some good.

  When I got to S.F., I went to every freak event in the Mission and SoMa neighborhoods. I bit my tongue for ages before I could introduce myself to people. And then people reacted. But not to me, to my name. Eyes far out, mouths open. “No way” and stuff. It turned out there was a big-deal performance artist named after me. Or the other way around. She just wasn’t famous in New Jersey. “You mean you didn’t know?” one girl said. “Daphne Gottlieb! She wrestled a stop sign and won!”

  I knew about performance art. When I was eight, my mom had taken me to see “street theater” in Bergen. Two guys dressed up as cows did the Macarena, except they changed the word “Macarena” to “factory farming.” It wasn’t even as entertaining as it sounds. I don’t know why my mom thought I needed to see that, but it was part of her pattern: months of tennis and needlework, and then the occasional twitchy attempt to expose me to culture. Mom found all her culture on AOL.

  But San Francisco was a whole other scene. One person spent an hour gushing to me about Daphne’s “Blogging in Blood” performance, which she did in the window of the Mission Art Hole, facing the street. She had a computer with a big screen, so the passersby could see her blog entries. She typed them on a keyboard with razors sticking out of every key (except the space bar, which just had sharp edges all around). As she typed, she bled. The keys got stickier, and then she was faint from loss of blood. “cant type ne more, OMG swimmin fishies in my eyez why do u all hurt me i need protean bringme a SLIMJIM now now now. its all yr fault, all yr fault, all yr fault, I HATE YOU ALLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL.”

  By the time I met the other Daphne, I’d been hearing about her for a month. The longer it went, the more nervous and curious I got. One night I worked up the courage to go to a lesbian club night. Toast, or Crash, or Joint. One neonish spotlight, half a mirror ball. We all danced right next to a sharp-elbowed pool game. I had bruises for days.

  And then my namesake came between the strobe and me. She towered over me, with jet-black dreads and tattoos and all. She looked at me. I tried to look back but the light was in my eyes. I shouted my name in her ear. She said she knew who I was.

  We went to a taqueria. She bought me some nachos and studied the way I tried to eat without being messy. In normal light, her eyes looked warmer. I’d pictured her being twitchy and neurotic. But she just sat, feet up on another chair, holding a bottle between two fingers like a huge cigarette. Nodding while I told her all about my own personal Daphne Gottlieb Experience so far.

  When I’d finished, she nodded some more. Looked at me from every angle, top to bottom. “Interesting,” she said. “Potential.”

  And she told me more about the performance-art scene. Like, there’s a hierarchy of fluids: applesauce at the bottom, semen at the top. (Blood is up there, but semen wins because it subsumes blood.) She told me about life as a femme, and explained all about the queer scene. And I didn’t know sexuality could be so complicated. Are you a vorpal bottom or a lateral domme? Do you use safe words or danger-grams?

  And then I mentioned that I had a hard time getting into clubs like the one where I’d met her, because I was under twenty-one and I had no fake ID. Then she reached into her purse and pulled out her driver’s license. She handed it to me: “Now you do.”

  The sun scared me. It rushed the one big window of Daphne’s apartment like it was going to ram us. (The window had teeth made out of empty beauty-product bottles, and velvet lips.) One second, it was the middle of the night and I was telling the local Daphne what passed for my secrets. And then, a second later, I was dawn blind. I hadn’t realized we’d stayed up all night. I remembered at some point, around 4:00 AM, Daphne had taken photos of me in my underwear from every angle, “to document the process,” she’d said.

  We had bonded so hard, I still felt high all the next day, even with the sleep deprivation. As if I’d found my soul mate along with my namesake. This Daphne didn’t look all that different from the goth-punk kids at my school, but she rocked the theatricality in everything. I wou
ld have been happy enough to be her audience, but she treated me like a fellow performer. Somehow she didn’t realize how lame I was, even after I told her my whole story.

  Daphne showed up half an hour late for our meeting a couple days later at the bowling alley-size CD store. But then she made an Entrance. Alligator boots, crocodile corset, elbow-length lizard gloves, all jet-black and faux. I stood there in my polo shirt and peasant skirt, wondering if I was in the wrong music video. Since I was new in town and knew no one, I didn’t want to crowd her. I stayed ready to vanish at the slightest hint: A tongue click, whatever, I would be gone. And yet, she seemed excited to have me around.

  We shopped all over the Haight, the two Daphnes. She helped me pick out a pair of boots, chunky platforms that lifted me to her height. My eyes could meet hers halfway all of a sudden, and she gave me that smile again, the one that put me on the inside. Her face looked so normal, at the center of all the display, and maybe that’s why I felt comfortable. And then I twirled on my high boots and saw all the people in the store, suddenly dwarves to me, scurrying below my eye line. They all looked up at me, as if I could rain fire on them.

  Daphne took me out. Presented me to her friends. “Let me introduce you to Daphne Gottlieb!” People thought it was hilarious. Hot butches and steely femmes flirted with me. I didn’t know what to do with the attention. Daphne said she’d teach me.

  Five in the morning, our fifth or sixth time hanging out, she dyed my mousy hair black. She helped me turn it into dreads. I started practicing her gestures. Saying things like “fucking yes and no,” and “hierarchies of teleology, bitch.” I started wearing black clothes with lots of buckles and straps, like her. I wasn’t sure if I was an art project or a fashion accessory—or what the difference was between the two.