Abandon Me

by Melissa Febos

  Fighting did not fix us. No amount of talking seemed to help. Finally, in a moment close to hopeless, I asked, Can we read?

  One of the first stories we read was Borges’s “The Library of Babel,” in which he depicts the universe as an infinite library. As I curled against her, my pulse slowed. In my beloved’s voice, Borges lamented “man, the imperfect librarian.” Reminded me that “the universe, with its elegant endowment of shelves and enigmatical volumes, of inexhaustible stairways … can only be the work of a god.” That though its pages may sometimes appear to me “a mere labyrinth of letters,” I am not meant to comprehend them. There were forces greater than that of my lover, than that of my longing. I did not have to be certain to believe in something.

  Over the phone, through the computer, into the pixelated darkness of each other’s bedrooms, we began reading each other to sleep.

  “Call me Ishmael,” I said. “Consider the subtleness of the sea; how its most dreaded creatures glide under water.”

  “It is not down on any map;” she answered. “True places never are.”

  Melville gave us answers. Lorca, the words we did not have.

  “My head is full of fire,” I told her, “mi casa es ya mi casa.”

  “If I told you the whole story it would never end,” she explained. “But I found / the hemlock-brimming valley of your heart.”

  The Story of Ferdinand was published in 1936, on the cusp of the Spanish Civil War, and the tale’s pacifist message provoked divisive reactions. Hitler ordered it burned. Gandhi named it his favorite book. Ernest Hemingway, that most pious patron of bullfights, was so offended that he penned a rebuttal story, “The Faithful Bull.” Unlike Ferdinand, Hemingway’s bull lived to fight, “and he would fight with deadly seriousness exactly as some people eat or read or go to church.”

  Like that of Ferdinand, Hemingway’s story ends with its hero in his glory. Rather than under a cork tree, the Faithful Bull meets his end in the ring. Ironically, Hemingway’s closing line, “Perhaps we should all be faithful,” could have as easily closed The Story of Ferdinand. Both made the same point: an animal has its nature, and faith to that nature is righteous. They do not promise ease nor redemption. To the faithful, to those who heed their own selves, both stories carry only the promise of being recognized for whom you are and taken home.

  I do not know if my beloved can be a home to me, but I suspect that our story will reveal my own true nature.

  Do you want to read tonight? became our refrain. Meaning, I want comfort, the things that pain me cannot be spoken yet. They will not be soothed by speaking. So we borrow words we can trust.

  Any book could be our book of hours, though it makes sense that we now read Hemingway’s The Dangerous Summer, because in our first year of love we had two dangerous summers. Because we recognize the worship and violence therein as our own. Hemingway’s bullfight is not only a fight—it is a dance, a song, a kind of love—professed as only one body can to another. And every night, we build his story the same way, as we have built our own story: out of breath, from the shapes our mouths make, with the soft hammer of pulse.

  Read, she tells me. We are in the hotel bed, but “Ernesto” is in Barcelona, and Antonio Ordóñez is in the ring. His rival, Luis Miguel, has done work with the muleta, “close enough to give the feeling of the nearness of tragedy within the marvelous security.” The crowd has gone wild for him, but we know he is no match for Antonio, not in Ernesto’s eyes.

  My beloved presses her lips to my head as I read and moves her fingers, lithe banderillas, across my chest. I lean my face into her and she nudges me back to the book. Read, she repeats.

  The Dangerous Summer billows with words like marvelous, perfection, beautiful, magnificent. We laugh at Ernesto’s infatuation with Antonio and the homoerotic depictions of the fights—his hero driving into the “death hole” over and over again. We laugh at the mentions of his wife, Mary, who appears only to announce an injured toe or a sunburn.

  This, Hemingway’s final work, was written as he slid into alcoholic death. Perhaps that explains all the perfections of his matador. Maybe they are the sentimental fixation of a drunk, dying man. Otherwise, perfection is only ever found in God and in love. Hemingway makes Antonio a god and perhaps he also loved him.

  “Close enough to give the feeling of the nearness of tragedy within the marvelous security” is not Hemingway’s best. It is, however, more accurate a description of our early love than any I have written. We are not unique in this. Still, it is hard to believe that anyone has ever felt such tragedy and security as that in my beloved’s hand when she touches me. Maybe this kind of love always carries with it a fear of abandonment—that blade of fear, that wound of our past.

  Antonio’s first bull in Barcelona is a good one. The matador swings his muleta, “with delicate, calculated slowness just ahead of the bull’s speed.” She slides her hand down my belly and presses inside my thigh, pulls it open. Antonio circles, riling the bull, and “moving always into him,” as her fingers move over me, lightly, then less lightly. I go quiet. Read, she says.

  The bull’s eye never leaves the muleta’s red flash. His burning haunches shine, chest heaving with furious breath, but Antonio never hurries. He molds the bull, “instructing him, and finally making him like it and cooperate.”

  Sweat gathers where my lover’s forearm crosses my hip, flexing with the motion of her hand on me. The crowd’s noise swells at each pass as the corrida builds its conclusion, and she dips her mouth into mine. We both make a sound. Then she pulls away. Read.

  Antonio, then, is “doing it all to music and keeping it as pure as mathematics and as warm, as exciting and as stirring as love.” It is an impossible faena and he is doing it. He drives the sword in perfectly and I know and Hemingway knows and all the crowd knows that he loves the bull.

  The book falls. She does not tell me to read. She tells me, Come for me. And I do. There are no more words. I am the rushing animal she has made me: all marvel, all mathematical magic, and music. I am perfect.

  My first Christmas in the desert, just before bed, she gave me a slim, wrapped gift. I tore the paper to reveal a familiar book cover—red with white flowers. The Story of Ferdinand.

  Read to me, she asked.

  Once upon a time, I began, and told her of the little bull who did not want to fight. Before I was halfway through, she fell asleep. I kept reading. Listening to her steady breath, I stared at Ferdinand alone in that ring and felt the familiar ache of my own heart. It isn’t gone. We find ways to comfort one another, and to comfort ourselves. And comfort eases, but it does not erase.

  Until then, we keep reading.

  LEAVE MARKS

  We first made love in a hotel room in Santa Fe, where the five o’clock sun simmered on the horizon, grazing her shoulders with its fire as she knelt over my body. I watched her mouth open on my hipbone and leave a wet print that shone in the light as she looked up at me.

  I had never been a lover who watched, but I watched her—hands tucked under my back as she bit my ribs, my belly, my breast. As her fingers slid inside me, her mouth latched onto my chest—the blank space just below my clavicle. I stopped watching then, stopped thinking of anything but the drive of her long fingers—how they filled me even as her mouth pulled, unraveling.

  After, in the bathroom mirror, flushed and swollen, I leaned in and examined the purple splotch shaped like Rorschach’s card VI, the most condensed inkblot of his ten. It is known as “the sex card.”

  It’s embarrassing, I said, after I’d climbed back onto the bed beside her. But I love hickeys.

  She laughed and slid her hand down my chest, pressed the mark like a button with her fingertip. You are wild.

  It’ll fade by Monday. I smiled. My pleasure notwithstanding, to arrive on the college campus where I taught emblazoned with love bites was unthinkable. Even as defiant teenagers, we massaged them with frozen spoons, scrubbed them with dry toothbrushes, held icepacks to our necks as i
f to cool our racing pulses.

  I’m writing an essay about hickeys, I told a friend.

  Ew, she said and crumpled her face. Curious, I thought. We don’t blink at sex as commerce—women’s bodies propped across billboards and television screens, the familiar iconography of male lust. We coo at pregnant bellies, sanctify that most blatant acknowledgement of sex, but shame this ephemeral evidence. A hickey is personal. It offers nothing to its witness but recognition. Is our puritan history so strong in us that to acknowledge touch for pleasure’s sake is vulgar? Maybe the hickey reveals other things, parts of our desire we’d rather not see in the light.

  One family vacation when I was eight, I played in the pool with a halved rubber ball. Turned inside out, it would fling into the air with a satisfying pop. Somehow, I managed to suction this apparatus to the center of my forehead.

  Look! I crowed to my poolside parents. And then, Ow! when it popped off of my face and splashed into the water. I rubbed my stinging forehead. When I looked up, my parents dissolved in laughter.

  Oh, honey, my mother grinned. Look what you did. The rubber hemisphere had left a circular crimson bruise in the center of my forehead.

  You’ve got a hickey on your face, said my dad.

  What’s a hickey? I asked.

  Well, my mother said. Sometimes teenagers like to suck on each other’s necks until they get bruises, like the one on your forehead.

  I gaped, incredulous. Why would anyone want to do that? But later, in the hotel bathroom, when I looked in the mirror, I touched the dark mark so gently, leaned in to see it closer in repulsion, in wonder.

  At ten, I discovered my neck. It felt like a secret my body had finally told me. A first drink, a light switch, a doorway where a wall had always been. Tracey Barren’s mouth tore a hole in the hull between my shoulder and jaw, and water rushed in. That pleasure was a revelation: If this, then what?

  After baseball practice, on a stray couch cushion in my basement, under an old beach towel, Tracey and I played “Date.” She was always the boy. Her mouth on my neck. The sounds of my mother starting dinner upstairs. Don’t stop, I said, for the first time.

  From the start, our love had edges, the kind I can’t help but touch—run my fingers along the jagged parts until they cut. For the first year of our relationship, my lover lived with another woman. She lived 2,500 miles away. When I saw her, after weeks of wondering, I was so hungry. I was angry. I was vibrating with fear. My mouth itched to close on her. As if that could make her stay.

  Tenderness toward the object of our desire becomes an expression of love partly, I think, because it so defies the nature of want, whose instinct is often less to cuddle than to crush. My want was more gnash than kiss, more eat than embrace. I cared for my lover, but that kind of desire precludes many kinds of love. Hunger is selfish. I wanted her happiness. I also wanted to unzip my body and pull her into it, or crawl into hers. It is no accident that we go to the pulse. Lust is an urge to consume and perhaps there is no true expression of it that does not imply destruction. I can’t say. But even my tenderness for kittens includes an impulse to put them in my mouth.

  The sound of sucking means many things and all of them are synonymous with hunger. It is no wonder, our obsession with vampires, werewolves, flesh-eating zombies. Lust is also a desire to be consumed. The vampire’s victim is arched in terrified ecstasy. We agree on this fantasy by the billion: devour us, leave us no choice but to surrender. Under my mouth, my beloved squirmed. Her hips rose, shoulders clenched, body resisted and yielded at once. The vampire is all measure and seduction until he tastes and loses control in the ravening.

  One day, she held up a photograph in a magazine: a red fox, pointed face, yellow eyes embering.

  Look, she said. Like you. So little, so pretty, and so wild.

  Under this light I both preened and cringed. Like the bite marks on her neck, it revealed the animal in me who so often won.

  Like no lover before her, she had seen these parts of me. Maybe she brought them out—how I get too hungry, eat too fast, chew with my mouth open. Jealousy heaves my chest and heats my hands, which sweat so often, those swift conductors of all feeling—both emotive and environmental. My teeth chatter easily though in sleep my temperature soars, a furnace metabolizing all the day’s suppressed impulses. I felt embarrassed on the mornings we both woke smelling of my metallic sweat, as if I had revealed some grotesque secret.

  My body has always given me away. Or maybe it’s the other way around.

  There is charisma in wildness and it was part of what drew her to me. How much I felt and how fast I moved. But so often the things that attract us are the things we grow to fear most. The things we want to change or control or keep only for ourselves. She began to instruct me. Speak more softly, she said. Don’t let them stand so close to you. You are mine, she said, and oh, how I wanted to be hers. The opportunity to prove myself compelled me. It was not the first time.

  Amelia, my best friend in fifth grade, must have been queer. Now, it’s easy to armchair-diagnose her, to see how she fit my future type: razor-smart, broody with repressed anger, funny as fuck. Back then, I only knew the curious mix of fear and affection I felt for her. Like many vulnerable people, she defended herself with violence. Indian sunburns, pinches, and monkey bites—in which she clamped my skin between her knuckles and twisted—Amelia flowered my thighs and arms with bruises. Every time she moved, I flinched. It didn’t stop me from spending every weekend at her house, though. That would have broken her heart.

  I could see her tenderness, her lack of control, the fear that drove her to hurt me, and I could take the pain. It felt like a responsibility. It felt like a way to love her. Though it wasn’t only for her.

  I am a woman who likes to be marked and to mark. And I did then, too. There was a satisfaction in those bruises, in being the object of her reaching, in withstanding it. Sometimes, at eleven years old, I felt invisible, like a ghost haunting my own life. And the marks she made on me were a kind of proof. Like the ghost detected by glass she holds or the reflection in a mirror, Amelia’s marks made me real. So many ways of being are intangible, can be explained away. Physical evidence is the easiest accounted. The things that mark us are the things that make us.

  It isn’t just me. Attachment and availability have been inscribed on human bodies for centuries, across continents. The Mursi people of Ethiopia insert lip plates in their girls as preparation for marriage, while the Kayapo of the Amazon use scarification and body painting. Contemporary North Americans are no exception; as we love to jab our flag into the earth, we brand our cattle, we mark our beloveds with bruises, babies, scars, disease, lipstick, and diamond rings.

  My hickeys, too, are not simply an expression of desire, but also of ownership. During that first year, when my beloved lived with another woman, near the end of our visits I would buckshot her neck, shoulders, and chest with hickeys. At least for the duration of those bruises, I could claim her body mine alone. I have always wanted to carve my name into the things I am afraid of losing. Perhaps the desire to leave marks is more honestly a desire not to be left.

  And as much as we like to own, we also like to be owned in love. Or at least, to belong to someone. I am a feminist, and the desire to be possessed is one I have been reluctant to admit. I may not want to flash a diamond ring or replace my name with someone else’s, but the mark of her mouth on me meant something similar—if not owned, then wanted. And who does not want to be wanted?

  I developed early. By the time most of my classmates reached puberty, I was already a C-cup. As a result, my first kisses provoked a reaction that my less-developed peers did not suffer. Today we call it “slut shaming.” And it happened to me before I even had a chance to be promiscuous.

  Much as we worship them, we also like to punish promiscuous women—or those whose sexuality is simply too evident. Sex is a slippery currency in a sexist society; access to my body worked in those boys’ favor but against mine.

 
For a year I suffered sneers and crude gestures in the junior high school cafeteria. Prank calls to my family’s home announced my sullied reputation. More than once I was groped in the school hallways. I absorbed that punishment without scrutiny and the shame of both my desires and my body was not easily unlearned. My brazenness as an adult who is unafraid to bear the evidence of her sex is partly restitution for those years.

  There are other reasons why love bites are the domain of teenagers. For one, amateurism—the first hickey is often a mistake, and one that many never make again. In repeat offenses, there enters an element of braggadocio. The guy who breaks the bed and mistakes it for the best sex ever. Look at us, the splotch-necked teens gloat, we are wild, we have sex. Despite its glorification, sex is most novel to its initiates. The hickeyed teens are broadcasting old news to the rest of us—their entry into a club whose membership is public.

  But my lover and I shared that novelty. While she lived with that other woman, and during the slow process of their separation, our public appearance as a couple was limited. I’d never had to hide my affections as an adult and that invisibility, however sensible, stung. I hated feeling like a secret and it spurred many fights between us. But much experience—not least mine as a former professional dominatrix—has taught me that restriction is the quickest route to fetishization.

  After we were free to expose our desire, we did so with intention, in compensation for that year of hiding. I gave readings with my neck tattooed by her mouth. We posted pictures online of our bare midriffs pressed together. I’d never been so public a couple, and I wore it the way I had rainbow “freedom rings” as a teenager—giddy with visibility.