Fucking Daphne

by Daphne Gottlieb

  “Excuse me for a moment,” I said. I knew the president was still smiling as I turned and made my way to the bathrooms. Maybe he sees this all the time, I thought. I felt exposed, ridiculous, a straight girl going batty over a mad flying woman. It didn’t matter to me that she was a woman, or a poet, or anything else. What she seemed like was a streak of light, something inside me laid bare.

  I stood and stared at myself in the mirror. My cheeks were red. I filled my palms with cold water, ran them over my face, tried to breathe normally.

  I hated being this way. I wished I could keep my feelings wrapped in a box inside me, pull them out as carefully as Christmas ornaments swaddled in tissue paper. My mother used to unwrap the ornaments every year, bring each one into the light and tell its history. When they were all dangling from the tree at once, the lights and tinsel curling around them, shining and glinting and glittering, it was almost overwhelming.

  I feel that way, like if I were to reveal myself, all this inside me, I would overwhelm everyone. At the same time, I want to take the whole world inside of me, stand in front of a room, and hurl words like axes.

  My eyes were wild in the mirror. When I cry or become emotional, they turn bright blue. They don’t even look real. The door opened. The energy of the room changed when she stepped in. She was all energy, all forward rushing and unfolding wings. The concrete bathroom became a cage then, a set of ribs. My heart pounded so loudly, I was sure she could hear it.

  “I know you,” Daphne said, her voice sweeter, raspier than I would have expected. “I recognize you. I think we know some of the same people.”

  I looked from my face to hers and back again. Sometimes I am so intent on watching things, taking them in, that I forget I am even there, that people can see me, too. I have to remind myself to speak.

  I cleared my throat. “I recognize you, too,” I said.

  She came up behind me. I am tall but she towered over me. I watched her face in the mirror—covered in sweat, wide open, her eyes huge and feral. Green. The president had said that it was an addictive, amazing feeling, being in the air. “Nothing makes you feel more alive,” he had said.

  The light was angling in through a crack in the door. It hung in the air like salt or snow. From here, I realized, you could smell the raw scent of the river.

  “Did you try it?” she asked.

  “Try what?”

  “Flying,” she said, flapping her arms and laughing.

  “I’m just here to write about it,” I said into the mirror.

  Daphne leaned down, her chin almost touching my shoulder, and then tilted her lips toward my ear. “It’s better than sex,” she said.

  I could feel her breath on my earlobe, her voice move under my skin.

  I turned before I could think about what I was doing. Her hands snaked around my waist. Why me? I wondered. What did she see? I wondered if she saw herself buried, the way the librarian sees herself in the tiny girl. For me, sex is always a pathway to something else. I don’t know when it is desire and when it is love, when it’s saving someone and when it’s not about someone else at all. But as I pressed my face into her neck, opening my mouth against her skin, I felt for once like I didn’t need words to ground me.

  My back was against the seat of the cab we were taking to Brooklyn, where she was staying. I was half in the world, half out of it. My whole book had been cast into relief: the trapeze, the whooshing sounds, the water, the way the air can transform someone, the way a body can slice through it. Her tongue in my mouth and my hands on her skin, my palms running up and down her arms. The tattoos. The thick ropes of her hair in my face, tapping my arms and shoulders. I was sure she was right there on the surface, transparent. I held on to her, clutched her, wanted to be her and to move into her and to break her and to be broken, put back together.

  Daphne was above me, my hands on her breasts, my mouth open against her neck, tasting her sweat and skin, her flying body, her hands inside me, opening me, releasing me from the earth. I pressed myself into her. I opened my legs as wide as I could, my knees knocking against the seat, and I would have let her run right through me if I could have. I didn’t care if the driver could hear me come. All I wanted was to be destroyed. It is this, sometimes, that I feel I am holding back. I came on her fingers, near tears. She rubbed her hand on my face. I could barely breathe.

  “What does this mean?” I asked after, kissing the inside of her bicep, the foreign words tangling over her skin.

  “What?” I could taste myself on her fingers as she traced my mouth.

  “These words here.”

  She laughed. “Beauty will be convulsive or not at all.”

  I felt like I was underwater. As I opened up my hand inside her, I could see the ropes and lines of the Brooklyn Bridge stretching up through the taxicab window.

  Her friend had a garden that was lush and tangled, filled with vines and torches. Daphne made me a pot of tea and we sat outside, the darkening yard lit by the white lights strung along the fence.

  It was already over, this thing that had passed through me. She was calmer than I was. I had a feeling that that was how she lived all the time, releasing herself into air. For me, coming back to earth is always hard, always bound up in grief. It’s like I’ve clawed open my chest, my heart, and then it folds back up like a pair of wings, leaving a trail of blood.

  You make me remember my own skin, I thought, the edges of my body.

  I thought of the trapeze. These moments that can’t ever be more than what they are, that reach toward other worlds and other selves. This is what it would be like, I thought. Grabbing the bar, hurtling through the air. It would be like grasping a stranger, a strange woman with long hair and tattoos down her arm maybe, releasing yourself to her, taking her in. There would always be grief in that, I realized, grief and beauty. At least for me, and for the girl I was writing.

  Daphne smiled, stretched out her hand to me. Her bracelet dangled from her wrist, glittered in the faded light.

  There was no way for me to tell her this, any of it. I could not believe that we did not have more words. That I felt broken, saved, everything. That I always forgot we were surrounded by water.

  BOXER’S FRACTURE

  Heathen Machinery

  It seemed impossible that I wasn’t dead. I’d be struck by the puzzle of it, that I could be in so much pain and still move my legs, still make words, still go out and have a drink. Those were the nights when I would lie awake, making sure that my heart didn’t stop beating, and that I didn’t stop breathing. When I talk about it now and tell people that it nearly killed me, they smile and nod with understanding because they think I’m talking in metaphor again. But I’m serious—it almost killed me.

  Somewhere before the beginning of this almost-death there was a newly minted boy with scars on his chest and stubble where everything used to be smooth. He was changing so quickly that I could hardly see him anymore. He was ready to leave and we fought over it. Please stay with me, I’d tell him. It can still be beautiful here. Whatever you’ve done, I still see us at the end of it.

  He couldn’t, and maybe he was right. By then, as I remember it now, I think my eyes had already stopped working. Even so, I begged him with my whole body.

  “You’re broken,” he said, and that’s how he dismissed me.

  My right hand flew away from me like a ghost and I punched the refrigerator next to his head. I didn’t know when he had become a fortune-teller, but he was right: I was broken. The refrigerator hardly flinched.

  The last truly tender thing he ever did for me was to hold a bag of frozen peas to my hand to stop the swelling. It seems mean to remove him from this story, as I’ve just introduced him, but it’s the best way I know to describe him to you. He was there, he changed me, and then he was gone. I want you to feel the hole of that.

  It’s odd to me that they can pin your bones back together, give you something for the pain, but do nothing for a broken heart. Would it even show up on an
X-ray? My heart, that stupid, selfish thing, was the only thing I felt. It stole the blood from the rest of my body and at first I felt only the numbness, and then I felt nothing. My body was becoming dead to me, but I kept it breathing and moving because those were the only things I could think to do with it.

  When I left the house—and I had to leave the house because I couldn’t live in all the spaces where he used to be—I wore a corset to keep my guts from falling out. I wore impossible shoes to help me concentrate on where I was putting my feet. I drank a lot and smelled like sulfur because I already had one foot in Hades. I wore a cast on my right hand and my wedding ring on my left and I didn’t feel a thing except for the hole of him in my chest.

  That’s how Daphne found me. Everyone else looked right through me, but Daphne saw me. She has a gift for seeing ghosts. I attached myself to her and haunted her because she was the only one in the world who would let me. I barely knew her, but when I saw her I’d curl my hand into hers and leave it there all night until it was time to go home and put myself away again. She’d drag me behind her from one place to another like I was her phantom limb.

  Other people will tell you how hard Daphne is. They’ll tell you about her sharp edges and the strength of her that can knock you to the floor and kick you in the throat. I didn’t see any of that. If it really existed, then I was safe inside the eye of it. For me, Daphne was only brutal tenderness. I have a gift for seeing ghosts, too. Daphne and I are a lot alike.

  I’d stay close to Daphne and whisper things into her shoulder so that no one else around us could hear. She always had an immediate answer for me and didn’t lie. I can’t imagine what it would look like for Daphne to lie.

  “How long am I going to hurt like this?” I’d ask.

  “For a very long time,” she’d say.

  “Does it ever get any better?” I’d ask.

  “It never does,” she’d say.

  “What’s the purpose of hurting so much?” I’d ask.

  “Because it’s possible,” she’d say.

  Asking her these things was like shouting down a hallway and waiting for the answer to come echoing back. The answers always came from her, but the voice sounded like mine.

  “I can’t feel my body,” I told her one night, and it was true. We were in a club where it was loud and crowded and I was forgetting how to keep myself breathing. I was forgetting how to make my heart keep going.

  This time she didn’t tell me the answer. She pulled me out of the club and into a cab and then from the cab into her bedroom and out of my clothes because I could do none of this for myself. I stood in a puddle of shoes and corset and gauze and armor until she put me gently into her bed. She crawled on top of me and wrapped her body around me like the warmth of it would keep me alive, and it did. Everywhere she kissed me tingled like pins and needles as the blood came back. I told her what was happening and she didn’t stop kissing me. I was surprised by this. She kissed me everywhere, even the places I hadn’t felt for years. She kissed my hand through the cast. She kissed my wedding ring. She was giving me my body back by the mouthful.

  I lay there like the dead, flat on my back, arms at my sides. Her hands gripped and pinched, slapped the life back into my skin. She moved around me like a nurse over a trauma victim, checking my body for damage, doing what was necessary, inflicting that kindness on me, asking me only once, “Does it hurt when I do this?” I told her that it did, and I asked her not to stop. Her teeth came through her kisses, scraping against the edges of me, overlapping me, blurring the lines. All the places she put her mouth, everywhere she touched, I couldn’t point them out to you on the map of me. Maybe she created those places. Maybe they didn’t exist before. I don’t know.

  Somehow, impossibly, my legs were parted and her hand was there, cupping me roughly and curling her fingers inside of me like I was something she had to get a grip on. I want to tell you about the softness of that, this little bit of pain that she gave me and the gift of actually feeling it, but I can’t do it right. I can tell you that when she put her fist inside of me, she used her other to hold me down so that I wouldn’t slip off the world. That is what someone who loves you will do for you.

  I cried when I came, in that way that takes the dead by surprise. I came and cried until I couldn’t breathe and the feeling of it was like being scrubbed by steel wool on my insides and my outsides. I came until my skin fell off and grew back again. I cried with her fist inside of me, sitting up and doubling over onto myself, clutching for her and pulling her half onto me, her arm at odd angles, her hand still inside of me. I cried until it was all over. I came and I cried and I didn’t think that was possible, but it was. I came and I cried because it was possible, and that’s what Daphne gave me, this possibility.

  She pulled out of me when we were done. She snuggled in behind me and curled me into her little spoon. I lay there breathing, my heart still beating, everything about me still tingling from being brought back from the dead. I lay there slightly alive.

  “Daphne,” I whispered to her later. I thought she was sleeping. “I don’t know how I’m going to live again tomorrow.”

  “You just will,” she said. She was right.

  DON’T MIND DYIN’

  Tennessee Jones

  New Orleans is where it actually feels like home. I am told I can never go home again, but damn, it feels like it sometimes, just for a few moments, an hour, one whole night until the sun comes up.

  I can go home in the bathroom of a bar, with my tongue flicking at the nexus of desire resting on the edge of Daphne’s boots, lapping at the fucking bottom of them, the tender pink meeting with her dirty day, my open mouth saying, I give you everything and therefore expect to become nothing for just one moment. Rock bottom under that boot, my cock fucking hard, and all the fags in that bar watching: What the fuck are they doing?

  Under the shadow of a van, my shirt rucked up around my shoulders and my jeans around my ankles, her giant fucking fist inside of me—no lube, just gravel and the stars overhead invisible, broken glass digging into my ass and people passing on the sidewalk just a few feet away, the scrub brush dew-wet and New Orleans skanky. The specter of I-10 hung over us, and the thought in the back of my head was, Oh lord, religion in the strangest places and we have a party to go to, and this city I’ve loved, this city I’ve loved!

  The party, when we finally got there, tattooed a beat inside me, the skeleton drum corps banging away and everyone dancing, sweating that familiar New Orleans ooze. No matter what happens to me eventually, there will always be something in that time that I will think of as home.

  There was no need to take a breath that night. There were angels carrying me, my toes hardly scraping the banged-up steps when we walked upstairs, arm in arm. How many words to describe: I’m home with you right now; even if it goes away tomorrow, I’m home right now. And at that party, fucking her in what used to be a bordello, out on a rickety balcony, the makeshift bar below, I imagined the hurricane that would one day take that city back to the sea. There was I, in the grave I’ll one day go to, and I do mind/I don’t mind/I do mind/dyin’.

  AFTERWORD: WHAT WE TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT FUCKING DAPHNE

  Merri Lisa Johnson

  “I’m bringing Daphne Gottlieb to campus.”

  Will stares at me across the table at El Burro Rosa. I like the way my statement sounds out loud. I like its suggestive overtones—bringing Daphne Gottlieb to campus—so physical, like I am bringing her to orgasm, bringing her breakfast in bed. The associations are available to anyone sitting at the table, because I have made my announcement in response to Will’s dismissal of my lesbian inclinations. I told him it was my girl year, that I was going gay. He looks sideways at Emily, the resident lesbian at our university, and shares a wry smile.

  “Good luck,” he says.

  I bristle. Like I can’t find a girl to kiss in Myrtle Beach who isn’t clad in the clichés of plaid flannel and buzz cuts. I say these stupid things—“It�
�s my girl year”; “I’m bringing Daphne Gottlieb to campus”; “I’m flying in cool lesbians from California on the university’s dime to supplement my sex life”—because I can’t say the truth. I can’t say, “I’m in love with Emily.” I can’t say, “My lesbian street cred is solid.” I can’t say, “I already fucked her twice today.”

  “Wait till you see Daphne,” I offer instead. “She has dreads.”

  I am feeding the misconceptions about me, about what turns me on, about what draws me to someone. I know it, hate it, but I can’t stop. I am throwing him off the scent, even as I long to break the silence surrounding my secret affair with Emily.

  Who knows? I think to myself. Maybe I will have sex with Daphne.

  Stranger things have happened.

  I see her sitting in the waiting area by the luggage carousels. I run from the revolving doors into her arms like a long-separated lover.

  “Daphne!”

  Her hands are shaking like she needs a cigarette, but really it’s an email jones. She immediately asks if I have Internet access. I don’t, so she asks if we can stop by campus on the way.

  “No problem.” I live to serve.

  In my office, I straighten the stacks on my desk while Daphne giggles and moons at the computer screen. I put pieces of paper in my recycling bin under the desk, lean down beside her left arm while she scrolls with her right. I could brush her skin with my lips my breast my arm. I could do it lightly to see if she is into it. I could ask her straight out, “Do you want to fuck in my office?” But I already know nothing is going to happen. The electricity of sexual attraction is not there for either of us. Daphne is in a relationship and, even though she is polyamorous, she allows for the romantic tunnel vision that comes at the beginning of a new connection.