Abandon Me

by Melissa Febos

  7

  A month after our first kiss, she bought me a ticket to Santa Fe. I flew to her a few days after my thirty-second birthday. On that plane, I shook. I had dismantled my life, and was flying across the country to meet a stranger. What would I feel when I saw her? Would I feel nothing? Would I turn around and get back on a plane? Would I suffer through the incredible awkwardness of that misplaced bet?

  The color scheme of Albuquerque “Sunport” is desert: turquoise, pink, sand beige. Walking through it, I felt weightless as a sun-bleached bone, a thing lost to the structure that defines it.

  I saw her first, slouched in cutoff jeans and T-shirt, body a curved S, hair hung over her shoulders as she stared at her phone. I saw in her the vulnerability of not knowing she was being watched. She looked up and her smile was nervous and real, and in it I saw what she’d looked like as a child. In the parking lot she set down my suitcase and took my face into her hands, her soft mouth landing me back into being.

  We kissed on the hot leather seats of her rental car, mouths tentative at first, hands drifting up to each others’ faces, then hungrier. On the drive back to the hotel I was so wet that I feared it would show through my dress so I leaned on one hip in the passenger seat.

  So much of our story is corporeal. I knew about somatic response, how the body takes what the psyche cannot bear and understands it as fever, as sweat and cramp, as cry, as come. But those were concepts. I had never lost my mind in this way, abandoned understanding to the body.

  Sex had always featured large in my life. By this I mean the things that surround sex. It had loomed in my own self-conception, and so in others’ perception of me. My body developed early, and I garnered a reputation as a slut in middle school, and was tormented daily for a short but formative time.

  Despite, or because of this, I became obsessed with being wanted. Sexual desire was the easiest to elicit—a strange power that I could exercise but not control. In college, I became a sex worker. Years later, I wrote a book about having been a sex worker. But none of these things were sex. Nor did they ever seem connected to my actual experiences of sex. I had done things for money that would shock most people, but of actual intimacy and pleasure, I had a small catalog. I had loved a few times and never made love with the lights on.

  I was so young when I started acting the part. After I quit the dungeon and the drugs, I came back to a self who had been buried under those masks. I discovered that I did not enjoy sex with lovers whom I did not love. Or was not at least beginning to love. And even then I never forgot myself. I discovered at nearly thirty years old that I was shy.

  In the hotel room, Amaia undressed me. I knelt on the bed, and she paused to look at me. It was late afternoon and still daylight. We did not draw the shades. I had never felt so naked, but her gaze was shadow-soft. Then she undressed, and I forgot myself. Her lean length, so different from my own shape, so similar in ways I’d never touched: her smooth skin and dark nipples, her long hair.

  The first time she asked me to come, she asked in Spanish, the Captain’s first language. It felt like a consummation. Not of love, per se, but a desire stored deep in our bodies. This, we said with our hands and teeth and tongues. This is as close as we can get to it. This is everything, and it is not enough. I understood what she had meant when she wrote that I had taken something from her. I wanted something from her that I could not name. My whole body was a mouth. My heart was a mouth that only she could fill, that she could never fill.

  The next morning I woke to her hands on me. Later she told me that she did not sleep at all. Her hands on my belly, my breasts, clasping my shoulder blades, my hips, my neck—it felt like she was building me. To be rebuilt, we must first be demolished. And by the end of that first month, I was already undone.

  8

  Though I was born in a tiny town near the Massachusetts border of Connecticut—I grew up mostly on Cape Cod, just a few miles from the largest Wampanoag population in this country. The summer we moved next to the Mashpee tribe, the Captain took me to their yearly Powwow. I was nine years old and had voyaged on the Captain’s ship. I had seen the bazaars of Tangier and smelled the dank tombs of the Giza pyramids. I had walked through the Valley of the Kings in Luxor. But I had never seen an Indian.

  Like much of coastal Massachusetts, Cape Cod has a large Cape Verdean population. From the early nineteenth century, whaling ships—whose crews included many Wampanoag—would pick up seamen from the small Portuguese fishing island on their regular routes. Like the Wampanoag, they were hard workers, and hired for little pay. By the early twentieth century, Cape Verdeans flooded the whaling capitals of New England, where they could earn money to send home to their drought-stricken island.

  With my olive skin, green eyes, and straight hair, I resembled the descendants of these whalers, who had mixed with European settlers and African slaves.

  Are you Portuguese? my classmates would ask, as early as elementary school.

  No, I’d answer. I’m Indian. I didn’t know what that meant. Only that I had parts that hadn’t come from my parents. Parts linked to a different history, to people outside of my family, to whom no one else was connected.

  It meant that I did not belong to their group—whose members all had similar names, names I’ve since seen on early crew lists in whaling museums: Gonsalves, Lopes, Cardoza, Texiera, Mendes. The Cape Verdeans had a clubhouse in town, and cousins by the handful. Though my name also came from a small island of seafaring brown people—Puerto Rico—no one recognized it. My cousins were blonde girls in the New Jersey suburbs. And though I knew the Wampanoag lived just one town over, a five-minute drive from our home, I had never met one.

  On a field trip to Plymouth Rock, when my teachers asked my classmates to imagine the sweet sight of land after months at sea, I imagined the sight of the Mayflower gliding out from the horizon, a white-winged colossus crashing into the shore, spilling bleached bodies. I wondered if anyone recognized their undoing in those hungry faces. I knew they hadn’t. But I wished that they had cut down those pilgrims as their feet touched the ground, felled them like pale stalks of corn.

  9

  The day after I returned to New York, we were on the phone. I had just stepped out of the shower and stood nude in my room. I was still drunk on our sex, languid and distracted, never not thinking of her. I pulled on my underwear.

  My wife knows, she told me. I didn’t ask how or how much. Maybe they were already sleeping in separate rooms. No one was talking about leaving.

  What do you think? she asked me.

  I answered without hesitation. It seemed obvious. I’m fine with this, I told her, and I was. But I probably won’t be after a while. I wasn’t interested in being anyone’s mistress. Who is? I guess we just do what feels right until it doesn’t feel right anymore, don’t you think?

  She got quiet and then we hung up. I didn’t think much of it. I didn’t think it had been a test. I didn’t realize I’d set a limit.

  An hour later, standing outside of a meeting in Manhattan, I got her e-mail. She was thinking of me, she said. Your unstoppable hips. The motion of them. And your mouth. I’ve been on my knees for your mouth since I first found it. But she had also been thinking about our strange talk. What talk? Had it been strange? I wondered. Something feels wrong, she said. And I know you are doing what you want until you don’t want to do it anymore. Maybe that is it. She was ending it. I will leave you alone now, she said, as if I’d asked for such a thing.

  It was the first time anyone had ever broken up with me. It was a thing I had successfully avoided for thirty-two years. We weren’t even a couple yet. I stood outside that meeting, reading her e-mail, and I felt myself break. I called her but she didn’t answer. I called and called. I walked into the meeting and sat for an hour. Heard nothing but the sound of breaking.

  I walked home across the Manhattan Bridge. I was not myself. I was no longer a woman. I was the sound of breaking. Pedestrians and bicyclists looked around, covered th
eir ears. My new roommate did not see or hear me unlock the door of the apartment. He went to his room. I sat in the kitchen, shivering. What had I said? It was the first time I thought, I will do anything. Her withdrawal opened a chasm in me, and I would do anything to fill it.

  When she finally answered the phone, I said, Listen. I am breaking. I will do anything.

  What do you want? she asked me.

  I want you, I said, and could hear that she was glad.

  Sometimes, she said, “want” and “need” are the same thing.

  10

  The powwow grounds smelled of hay and smoke and fry bread and bodies. Indian bodies. All around us. Just minutes out of the car, I saw that Indian meant a thousand things that I’d never known. Sellers hawked blankets from tables in labyrinthine rows around the perimeter of the field. They sold baskets and pottery and belts and jewelry on deerskin strips beaded with wampum carved from quahogs and conch shells. A tall muscled man in fringed leather and headband carved a canoe from a felled tree.

  In the middle of that field, they danced all day. They circle danced, blanket danced, grass danced, and fancy danced. I watched their feet stomp and tear up the grass until the ground was bald dirt, dust clouds, the women’s skirts darkened at the hems. Their drums shook my chest. I had a stomping in me. Something to give of my body, to my body, to beat into the ground. I felt it there, and it felt more solid than anything else in me.

  But when the Captain got to talking with an Elder—a woman whom he still says he was drawn to because her face looked like what my face might look at her age—and she offered to teach me those dances, said that I could join them, that there was enough blood in me to belong there, I shook my head. I clung to the Captain’s arm, and said no.

  I was nine and already felt, I am not enough of this. For this. I already believed that some things were given and not sought. I understand now that he was trying to give me something. But it was too late. I was already finding other ways to anchor myself in this world.

  After dark, the Wampanoag men played a game called Fireball. Like soccer, it consists of two goals, and a ball to kick through them. Unlike soccer, the players are permitted to use their hands. And the ball—constructed of wire mesh and a bundle of kerosene-soaked rags—is on fire. It is a medicine game. Before it begins, all the men think of suffering loved ones, living and passed, and pray that the pain they feel when the fireball scorches their hands and feet lessens the suffering of others.

  In the dark, we stood amid the crowd. We watched that flaming ball soar across the field. We smelled its burning. We could not see the players, only the flickering of that blaze as their bodies passed between us and it—less men than un-fire, than darkness gathered into form, into muscle and grunt. When the ball neared the goals, the crowd roared, their bodies leaning in. Pick it up, they screamed, Pick it up!

  I didn’t need to belong to feel that fire, to understand that a burning thing could heal, if you were willing to take it in your hands.

  11

  For the first year, I could not go to her home. She came to New York, and we met in other places. In November, she gave a lecture at a large university in Ohio. We met in the airport and the young woman who had booked her drove us to our hotel. I sat in the backseat of the young woman’s car and Amaia in the passenger seat. As the two of them spoke, their tones more familiar than I had expected, I watched Amaia tap her hand against the young woman’s thigh for emphasis. I watched the young woman look at Amaia.

  How do you know her? I asked later at the hotel.

  From online, she shrugged. Just e-mailing.

  That weekend, Hurricane Sandy trapped us in Ohio, watching New York get pummeled from the hotel television. The rooms of the boutique hotel were themed, and ours was the Treehouse. A canopy of smooth branches crowned our bed, and orange lights glowed on the bedside tables. We were only a few states away from New York, but it might have been another world.

  Fantastical worlds had always seduced me. I had built such worlds in love. And the stories I loved most were of this kind.

  My favorite film at fourteen was Peter Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures. The story tells of two New Zealand teens—Juliet and Pauline—who meet in school and fall into a rapturous kind of love. Juliet is played by a young Kate Winslet. She is beautiful and charismatic. She reframes their ordinary lives with masterful invention. And in her conception, they swell with romance and drama. Juliet transforms Pauline into a tragic and noble heroine, and Pauline forms, in the words of her doctor, an “unhealthy attachment” to Juliet. The two girls begin writing a novel together about a world that Juliet names Borovnia. In Borovnia, the dramas of their daily lives are translated into mythological proportions. The Borovnian scenes depicted in the film are lush and magical. They are vibrant as Oz in Technicolor. The boundaries between their real lives and their fantasies blur, and ultimately the magic ends in murder. It is a visually magnificent film, and as profound and accurate a depiction of fantasy’s power as any I have seen or read. At fourteen, I had had such rapturous affairs with other girls, had departed into the worlds of them, and though none were so undifferentiated from reality, I recognized the truth in Jackson’s film, about the power of illusion and of story—how believing in it could save you, could steal you, and become the real.

  Where did you come from? Amaia asked me, cupping my face in her hands, voice breathy with wonder. She splayed her fingers across my chest, belly, and hips—measured every part of me with her palms. I was a marvel. I was her Pandora. And her desires were the gods who created me. You are so beautiful, she said again and again. Your mouth, your mouth reinvents the word “mouth.”

  I squirmed under this scrutiny, laughed, but she stayed serious.

  Your hips, she said, pressing her mouth against them. I didn’t know what hips were before yours.

  Yeah, right, I murmured, burying my fingers in her hair.

  I mean it, she said. Touching you makes me feel like I have a hundred hands, makes me wish I had a hundred more.

  Hesiod doesn’t name Pandora in his Theogony; she is only a “beautiful evil,” the sight of whom seizes gods and mortals alike with wonder.

  My girl, Amaia murmured, and repeated my name like a mantra, until it felt like a word carved by her mouth. Until I couldn’t remember what it had meant before she spoke it.

  Our last day, we made love all afternoon, and at midnight she walked a mile to bring me back a piece of chocolate cake, tarry with sugared frosting. We ate the cake, and made love again, our mouths sweet, her hair smelling of the winter outside.

  Then she went quiet. Now I knew better. Worry sawed in my gut.

  What’s wrong? I asked her.

  Nothing, she said. I scoured the afternoon, searched for something I’d missed. I began to cry.

  I tried many ways to name that feeling. For her and later for myself. The most accurate description and the one I give here is not mine. It is from The NeverEnding Story. The film’s protagonist is a native boy—Atreyu, an orphan. The antagonist is a force called the Nothing. The Nothing consumes all in its path, annihilates all life with its infectious despair. Even its name is a riddle, a vacuum—it can’t be fought. Like Odysseus, who tells the Cyclops Polyphemus that his name is Nobody. When Odysseus blinds the Cyclops, the Cyclops cries out that “Nobody” has blinded him, and no one understands or believes in his pain.

  The feeling Amaia’s silence triggered in me was a Nothing, a Nobody. I could not name it—like hunger, it was an emptiness, an emptier.

  We sat in that hotel room under the bed’s dark branches. She in her silence and me in my Nothing.

  Finally, she explained. Te amo, she said. I need you.

  The next morning, the storm had grounded all planes. She left the hotel room to call home and say that she was delayed. We rented a car and drove through the next night, eleven hours down ghosted highways strewn with tree limbs. Near dawn, when we emerged from the Lincoln Tunnel, the city itself had been ravaged by a Nothing. The stre
etlamps, stoplights; all that neon snuffed out. Awnings torn from storefronts. Abandoned.

  I glided across this new Manhattan, eyes burning with exhaustion. The world had lost its pulse, but with her beside me, it no longer mattered. That morning, I understood that to love me terrified her, the way losing her terrified me. I knew that she had suffered losses as a child and that she was slow to trust. I will take care of her, I thought. I will show her it is safe to love me. I will empty the streets of my life for her. I will become a city for her alone.

  12

  As a little girl, I could eat as much as a man. The Bottomless Pit, my mother called me. We did not have the same snacks in our cupboard as my friends did. But I still ate our nuts and dried fruits until they were gone, until my stomach bloated, until my mother waved the empty jars at me. You’re not even hungry! she’d say. You can’t be. But I was hungry. For food, for approval, for secrets, for my legs’ push against the ground, for the ocean, for words. For none of these things at all, but for the brief satisfaction of filling myself with them.

  My hunger was a dark spot behind my solar plexus, its gravity so great that I felt the tug in my fingers and toes. I pressed my hands under my ribs. I filled a bag with food from our kitchen and took it to my room. In my room I read and I ate. I didn’t feel hungry. I didn’t feel anything. I didn’t even exist. It was perfect. Then, one afternoon, I went into the tiny half-bath and dug my hand down my throat. Even then I had big hands. I reached into my body and emptied it. After, I lay in my bed and kept reading. It was a different kind of full, this emptiness.

  I was eleven. My body had begun turning against me, swelling outward. It was the summer before I learned that its burning could be a power that eased other hurts, other hungers. For a while, it would be the only medicine I needed. But the summer I was eleven, I was going to baseball camp.