Affection

by Krissy Kneen

  “Stupid girl.”

  Evan held my hair back from my face as I vomited, and he cleaned up after me. He made me drink so much water that I vomited again and even then he forced my head back and poured water down my throat.

  “Stupid girl.” He stroked my head on the pillow and I was terribly tired and couldn’t stop crying. I remembered the CWA, and I was thinking, this will get better and then it will happen again and right now it feels like the end of the world, and even if tomorrow is a brighter day, there will be another and another, and the army of days stretching ahead made me hoist a white flag and lie back in the bed and hope that I had ingested enough tablets to ease me away from the world.

  I hadn’t. I woke late the next day. My eyes were finally dry and the light was too bright and my head ached so badly that I could barely think. One thought bobbed to the surface and floated there.

  I just can’t drift along like this. Something has to change. Something has to change.

  BECOMING CATHERINE DENEUVE

  Brisbane 2008

  Every day I come back to my computer. I trawl through my sex life, one post at a time. I begin to find the patterns, the back and forth clacking of the ping pong ball. I have bounced between one lover and another and I remember the sex. Most of my other memories are vague, a watercolor wash of people and places I only half recall. The sex remains strikingly clear. Visceral: I remember the sex in my body. I smell it on me when I have finished a blog post and emerge, tired and a little confused back into the real world, in my aging body. Who am I now, I wonder. Where have I left myself?

  My blog posts unearth a pattern. I am growing older and the fear that I might lose my sexuality to the passing of years is palpable.

  We all grow up to be somebody. We make ourselves up, one piece at a time, from all the possibilities around us. When I grow up I want to be as warm and cuddly as my mother. When I grow up I want to be as kick-ass as Batgirl. When I grow up I want to be Catherine Deneuve.

  And then we grow up and we become the same person we were as a child, only with affectations gleaned from comic books and movie stars and real-life heroes. Underneath the various masks nothing much has changed.

  Approaching my fortieth birthday, I look at my dirty laundry, aired publicly on my blog posts, and I know suddenly that I will not grow up to be Catherine Deneuve. I will not magically become the refined but impossibly sexy French superstar despite the hours of watching, pressing rewind, watching, longing, watching.

  When I am forty I will be the same unsettled, scatty child who grew bored of climbing a tree halfway up; who could weep for the loss of a toy and, a matter of days later, not remember the toy at all. Who could turn around and start a book again from the beginning, and come to the ending as full of wonder as if I had never visited it before.

  I am a middle-aged married woman. I sometimes glaze through my days in a cloud of forgetting, swept up in a hungry tide of wanting. I allow myself to wander freely amongst all of this romantic possibility forgetting that, one, I am old; two, I am not particularly attractive; three, I am married.

  I am beginning to realize that when I grow up, which surely must be any day now, there will be no satisfying turnaround where my ordinary life crashes against my fantasy realm and I finally become the real me.

  Christopher invites me for a beer after work and I sit with him and I try my hardest, but I can’t even conjure up a sliver of attraction toward him. I have been chatting to Paul on the Internet and now Christopher has been usurped. I don’t even remember what Paul looks likes, just a vague impression, but we talk every night. I feel like his voice is my own voice, and I feel an attraction built on disembodied words.

  “Do you know that boy, Paul, your writer friend? The one we met at that festival?”

  Christopher nods.

  “Should I invite him for a drink with us one day? ”

  “We can go for a drink,” he tells me, but his eyes have narrowed down to a suspicious squint. “If you want to, we can go for a drink with him.”

  I look at Christopher now and I feel the warm glow of my fondness. I say, “You know I think we’ll be friends till the day I die.”

  He looks at me cautiously and orders me another beer.

  BREAKUP SEX

  Brisbane 1989

  I lay next to Evan and we were holding hands, sticky with our sweat and juices. I could hear his blood pounding through his wrist.

  “Why didn’t we have sex like that when we were together?” he asked, and I turned away because I was afraid I might cry.

  I was there when he opened the door and not a word was spoken. We kissed, a gentle kiss with the door wide open behind us. A pause to close it, and an irresistible descent into the kind of passion that we never managed when we were together, and a lurching sensation which I realized was our love for each other surfacing briefly, bobbing up and falling away again. The corpse of it, sinking.

  The sex we had that night was not the comforting kind that we had grown used to. We stole pieces off each other, samples of skin secreted away under our fingernails, the taste of sweat, the bitter burn of his semen that I would taste at the back of my throat for days. He pressed his thumb into my skin so fiercely that I felt the flesh give and his fingerprint is still on me, a lasting scar.

  We didn’t speak of the bad times, but they were there, too, in the way we tugged at each other’s hair and in the tears that streamed from our eyes into each other’s mouths.

  We lay in the ruin of our relationship and the glory of our sex, all contradictions, loving each other and hating that there was nothing left to do but part.

  “Why didn’t we have sex like that when we were still together? ”

  “Because we were still together.”

  THE ARCHITECT

  “You see,” the architect explained, “you’re just not the girlfriend kind.”

  And of course I wondered if he thought this because I had just enjoyed anal sex for the first time. Perhaps girlfriends didn’t let their boyfriends slip it into their back passage. Perhaps girlfriends contrived to appear violated at the very thought, pretended to grimace in pain when their boyfriends dared to breach the sacred threshold. Despite the modest size of their boyfriend’s penis.

  I was sweating from the effort of it all, an energetic oral titillation with barely a hint of reciprocation. Of course I had enjoyed it. There had been days of teasing. The architect, I can’t remember his name now but I’m sure it was something double-barreled, was from good stock. Moneyed. His clothes were fine and he was fond of telling me the brand name of his shirts, even though the name meant nothing to me. He did look good. He was good in bed. I had been sleeping with him for over a week and of course, given the repetition of our meetings, I thought we might have graduated from casual acquaintance to something in the realm of dating.

  “Don’t take offense,” he told me, struggling with the knot in the top of his condom, dabbing himself clean with a tissue.

  I would have hated him at that moment, but the sex had been good and I wanted to like him enough to do it again. This was the first sex I had had since the breakup, and it felt good to be touched again, good to escape the neat suburban haven of my temporary flatmates.

  “But there’s this girl I met and she’s more like a girlfriend type, if you know what I mean.”

  I didn’t.

  “You’re sexy,” kisses then and nuzzling and really, I didn’t like him all that much, but the thought that I was something less than the girlfriend type seemed to itch at me. I wanted this boy, the architect, this spoiled little rich kid with his designer shirts, to like me more than he liked her.

  “She’s a nurse.”

  I could be a nurse.

  “At the hospital.”

  I could dress in a little white dress with nice sensible white shoes. I could wear good underwear beneath it; no underwear, perhaps. I was sure he would like it if I turned up, pantyless with a sponge bath.

  “You met her . . . ?”

>   “On Saturday. At a party.”

  Saturday was three days, half a relationship, ago. The real girlfriend settling into place quietly in the background and him, the architect, tickling my asshole with his fingertip, counting the days in subtle coercions. Just a fingertip, then the whole finger, then here, on day three, a full-scale anal penetration before beating a hasty retreat.

  “Come on. Don’t be like that. Surely you know you’re not the girlfriend type.”

  I knew it. Even then, when it was only him, the appalling architect, informing me of my shortcomings. I knew it. There was something unusual about my passion for sex. I consumed it as real girlfriends might consume chocolates, licking their fingers afterward, savoring the smell of it on their breath. Three other men would tell me later that I was not a “girlfriend” kind of girl. A repetition of a theme. One of these men was kind enough to pick out friends of mine as examples—her, she’s a girlfriend kind, and her. A considerate lover.

  I was not the girlfriend kind, but he shrugged when I asked if I would meet him tomorrow.

  “So long as you know,” he told me. “So long as you don’t get attached.”

  But the blindfold may have been one step too far. He was up for it, of course. He knew I would take him somewhere secret. He let me tie the cloth around his face, inching his crotch toward me, eager to begin the night’s proceedings.

  I had arranged a driver, Lucy, a friend of mine.

  My architect hadn’t expected Lucy to be there either. As he heard her voice, a whispered call to action, I felt him shrink. But by this time I had tied his arms behind his back, tightly enough to make it difficult for him to escape. She was good with knots. She had shown me how to tie the rope, and it worked. I grinned at her and pulled hard enough to make him flinch.

  I was new to this. Until now it had all been one more petal pulled off a fragile flower. He loves me or he doesn’t, the flowers all tacked together like a daisy chain. I looked back on my insipid handful of lovers and they were all smudged over as if they had been shot in soft focus with Vaseline smeared on the lens. They were David Hamilton photographs, and me in my billowing black dress, running through some field or other.

  I tied his hands and he was shaking, only partly with pleasure. He barely knew me and he was putting himself at my mercy. His edginess made me feel warm, a little inflated with possibilities that I had never even considered before this.

  I took him to the mountains.

  He tried to speak in the car and I told him not to. I told him that he should just listen to the sound of the tires on gravel, the sound of the sealed roads slipping away. Smell the pungent scents of the country edging in through the windows.

  I laid him on an unfamiliar bed in an unfamiliar house. I left the blindfold on him, left his hands tied. I undressed him and found there was no way to take his shirt off without releasing his hands. I could have ripped it. They do that kind of thing in movies and in books. I could have found the scissors and cut the fabric at a seam. It would have added to it all, the sound of the scissors snipping through the expensive linen, but I could never save up enough out of my Austudy to replace it, so I left him with his shirt unbuttoned. I licked his chest, found the rising buds of his nipples and sucked on them, one at a time.

  I moved lower, concentrating on the straining penis, just enough spit to lubricate the inside of the condom. I was going to concentrate on my own pleasure. This was something that I had never done with a partner before.

  I stood and watched his body unobserved. It was a fine collection of skin and muscle and bone, a strong body, thin but well formed. I watched it, but there was no quick lurch of desire in my stomach at the sight of his erection. When I turned him over on the bed I saw the tight curve of his ass and it was fine and quite beautiful but I felt no emotional attachment to the thing. I touched it. I settled myself on top of it, straddling the curve of flesh. I traced the indentation with my thumbs. He bucked back against me. He wanted me inside him. This was something we had done before, something I enjoyed, but his insistence turned me off the whole idea.

  I lifted myself off him and went to my overnight bag. My vibrator was a small finger of black plastic. Nothing special, just one speed, a minimum of fuss. Tonight I would focus on my own pleasure. Just me, my vibrator and the blind body of this other person.

  I would take my pleasure.

  He wriggled in frustration, a landed fish. There was, of course, the quick image of a short knife gutting. In my new role as aggressor, I felt an underlying possibility of violence simmering. Something shifted between us.

  I lowered myself onto him and I would be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy the power of it.

  Finally, a few days later, he gave me the handgrip from a bicycle and settled against the wall. He wanted to watch. I suppose I knew that this would be the last time for us. There was no kiss hello, no hug, just a handing over of the implement.

  “I want to watch,” he said and settled, just like that.

  “You want me to masturbate? ”

  “Yes.”

  “You want to watch?”

  “Yes.”

  I could have said no I suppose, but this was an adventure I had never been on. I was always up for an adventure.

  “Open them.” Like the disembodied voice intruding on a scene from a pornographic movie. “Now spit.”

  I glared. As if the boy could direct me toward orgasm better than I could direct myself.

  “Be quiet,” I told him. “Or I won’t be able to come.”

  “I don’t care if you come or not.”

  And so the line was drawn. I raced him, from my position perched on the edge of his bed. I watched him, fully clothed but for the ridiculous protrusion of his penis, his hand on it. No spit for him. He had the bottle of lubricant and he used it liberally. I would make this about me, I thought, about my orgasm. I could use him just as well as he would use me. I watched him stroke himself in that halting, a-rhythmic way he had and I wanted to get off on it, but I found myself hating him instead. A little bit more with every stroke.

  He directed me from his lazy lean, removed from the activity yet involved. When he was close the directions stopped. He closed his eyes and I watched his whole body tense and I watched him catch his ejaculate in the palm of his hand.

  I sat on the edge of the bed with the handle from a bicycle inside me and I didn’t want to continue. We would not continue. He wiped his hand on a tissue and zipped himself up and he looked unruffled.

  “Thanks for that.”

  When he walked out into the lounge room to get a beer I knew that I would never see him again and that was okay, too. I didn’t particularly like him with his nice clothes and his fetish for nurses. I liked the sex, which was always detached and slightly angry, but I didn’t like waking up beside him and I had rarely slept over for this reason.

  He was expecting me to stay for a beer, but I gathered up my things and I left. I left the bicycle handle on his clean black bedspread where it would drip and stain and he would have to wash the whole thing, which would annoy him.

  MEETING IN REAL LIFE

  Brisbane 2008

  Christopher is looking out for Paul because he knows him better, but I remember Paul as soon as I see him. I wasn’t sure I would. Christopher and I have chatted our way through two beers and then Paul is here, suddenly, and I know it is him. He has a manner which is both confident and shy at the same time, as if he is apologizing for his own self-assurance. I recognize his voice. He never wavers in his manner. It is the same rhythm and meter that I enjoy so much from our electronic chatting. There is comedic timing, and Paul is quick. He leaps from one topic to another like a dancer. He can take us both, Christopher and I, engaging with our similarities and our differences.

  I buy him a beer.

  We turn our attention to people we have in common. This is one of those towns where people wash up against each other. Huddles of people bob on a cyclical Brisbane tide. I have probably slept with friends
of his mother’s or at least friends of her friends. It is inevitable. We find people in common and we circle around them.

  Paul likes girls, it seems. Girls like him. Girls that I have had altercations with like him. He likes some girls who dislike me and actively make my life difficult. He mentions their names and extols their virtues. He likes them and he will not back down. My glower is a siren, warning him against shallow water and sharp rocks. Paul is perhaps a little drunk and therefore unable to read me neatly. He blusters on.

  I am becoming irritable as I down another glass of wine. “We should stop talking about her, maybe.”

  Christopher suggests a meal. He is more sensitive to my moods than Paul, it seems. He wants us up and walking. We move to a restaurant nearby and it seems the fresh air has lightened things. We talk about food, swap recipes. Paul likes to cook and I have a knack with herbs and spices. It seems our ship has righted itself. I push off into safer waters and he sails alongside me, but in a pause he mentions another girl, my arch-nemesis. He counts the things he likes about her, her manner, her habit of giggling and touching him on the arm. I tell him that this is an affectation, that I would never use such calculated moves to charm someone, but Paul will not budge from his admiration and when our food arrives, I eat it with a tight throat. At one point I think I might choke on a chicken burrito, but I swallow it and chase it down with more wine.

  The problem with the Internet is that it is so easy both to misinterpret and to misrepresent. In the harsh light of the real world, I take stock of Paul and know that my assessment was misguided. He is an irritant. He is a charming liar. He is a clever salesman with the gift of the gab and a penchant for flirtation. I will not be flirted with by him.

  When we come to the subject of dating I explain that I have never gone on dates, just one, a disaster that ended in bad sex and subsequent avoidance tactics. He says he would like to take me on a date, but at this moment that is the last thing I would want to do. I want to finish my meal, scull the last of my wine, and find the quickest path away from him. Later, I will not talk with him on the Internet. I will not be fooled by his faux-sensitive banter. He is all lies.