Affection

by Krissy Kneen

  But still there is something about the quiet hurt in the droop of his girlish mouth and the odd style of his dress, and the slightly mannered way he speaks. Something about all of this makes me think that there must be more to him than that. Some softer place that he is hiding beneath a calculated exterior.

  CAUTIONARY TALES

  Brisbane 1989

  There was a series of lovers then. I moved restlessly from one to the next. I moved between crowds. One night I stayed home with the suburban couple, eating a pleasant meal and sharing their wine; the next night I prowled through the streets of Herston, finding a gathering at one student house or the next. I slept on couches and I stayed awake in bars until late. There was very little money, but I could walk vast distances, I had practiced. I could wander from one place to the other. There was university and then I found a sign for café staff needed and got the job. There was a little more money then and I could prowl the late night bars for potential partners.

  I played, but I played in relative safety. Condoms were essential, bareback was not an option. These were the days of the grim reaper ads and I knew I could die from it.

  There exists a kind of dating etiquette, I realized, that I had never learned. I developed my own code of honor through trial and error. I would say no to anyone who approached me unless they seemed nervous and unpracticed. I would approach a potential lover on my own terms and with no encumbrances. I would not accept free drinks: I was not repaying drinks with favors, I was making a conscious choice. And I rarely went back to their house, choosing to consummate in a side street or at a friend’s house or my own.

  There were, of course, experiences along the way that led to the getting of this wisdom.

  1. Paying Your Own Way

  I had to sleep with him because he paid for dinner. Not just dinner but drinks as well. I tried to pull my wallet out but he waved it aside and I felt my enthusiasm dissipate. Now I would have to sleep with him and I had had to endure his conversation for a whole evening, a boy who never seemed to tire of talking about himself.

  This was my first actual date, when someone asked me out and not the other way around, and I realized then why I had never dated. It was the conversation, scraping at the fabric of a perfectly fine evening with the fingernail shriek of his voice.

  The pillowcase was an inspiration. The imperative was to find a way to stop him kissing me. He had a nagging tongue that kept invading my mouth, a hard probing tongue. It made me think of the dentist’s chair and I couldn’t breathe because of it. I wanted to spit it out. I’m not sure why I thought of the pillowcase, but suddenly it was there and I reached for it and jammed it over his head, a kind of cotton bag that kept his tongue away from the inside of my cheeks. He still kissed me through the yellowed fabric, but it was a chaste kiss, inoffensive, and with his face hidden he could have been anyone. I imagined that he was someone else, someone who hadn’t bored me for the better part of the evening, someone who hadn’t paid for my dinner at an expensive restaurant.

  Even with the bag, I could hear him, droning on and on, sex talk. How could sex talk be so monotonous?

  The stocking was a masterstroke. I tied it around his chattering mouth and he became silent all of a sudden. Another stocking for his hands and he could not even squeeze and poke at me. I felt myself relaxing into the anonymity of the event. When he groaned I shushed him and he quietened miraculously. I began to enjoy the blank canvas of his body. I fished my vibrator out from under the pillow and let him buck his hips up to meet my strokes, one small compensation and it seemed to make all the difference to him. He came as quickly as I did and as silently.

  He called. He called and called and called. I told my roommate I was out, and he relayed the information into the receiver—“She says she’s out”—making me laugh. You could probably hear it over the phone.

  My roommate asked me why I was avoiding the man and I told him and he could barely understand. “But you slept with him,” he said, incredulous. “You tied him up and gagged him and slept with him. He must think all his Christmases have come at once. Why did you do that if you hated him?”

  “He paid for dinner,” I told him. “And drinks.”

  I don’t think he ever understood my reasons, but he kept fending off the poor boy’s calls as a true friend must.

  “I’d sleep with you, too, if you were bagged and gagged,” I teased, but the truth is I would have slept with him butt naked in the bright moonlight without blinking. I was fond of him and he was fond of me, but when I suggested it, he shook his head.

  “You’re just not my type, my love,” he said.

  2. Excessive Alcohol Consumption

  And then he fell asleep. Rolled onto his back and fell asleep. Just like that.

  “. . . rolled onto his back and fell asleep.”

  “What? Just like that?” said my roommate.

  “Just like that.”

  I shouldn’t have said anything, of course. The situation brought my sexual prowess into question and I was quite proud of my prowess. I wrapped the duvet around me tightly and sat at the kitchen table, and he settled a cup of tea in front of me. The comfort of steam. I sniffed.

  “He was fine when he was on top, it’s just when we changed places. He just seemed to close his eyes and then . . . that was it.”

  “Fell asleep . . .”

  “Just like that.”

  The man asleep in my bed would be shivering through his dreams, since I had left him nothing but a cotton sheet to keep the night away. I huddled into the warm layers of my quilt and held the fragrant cup against my lower lip.

  “Am I boring? Do you find me boring? ”

  “Of course not. He had too much to drink.”

  “I’m going to tell him about it in the morning.”

  “I know you are.”

  “I will.”

  “I know it.”

  I sipped. He’d turned over onto his back and I was on top and I was just finding a rhythm when I looked down and saw that he had fallen asleep.

  “Just like that. I can’t believe it.”

  And he tutted like the good friend he was and sipped his tea.

  3. Letting Them Sleep Over

  Dark night of the soul and no sleep anywhere but in the slack face of this strange lover. Flaccid penis, hair sweating into my pillow. Dead to my pacing and the wringing of my hands.

  Sex like a drug buzzing in my bloodstream. I’d been calmed by the orgasm, the chemical release of pheromones, but after the lull I was all wound up again. I was awake and pacing and I would run out into the dead night, the hot night teeming with the little scuttering of cockroaches, the insect hum of traffic lights. I was held to this prison of my own bedroom by a sleeping stranger who might wake to an empty house.

  What if he did? If he woke and I was gone? Would he leave? Would he take something of mine with him? What was mine to take? I had nothing of great value, an armful of photographs torn from magazines, some notebooks with words more precious to me than jewels, some paperbacks, scuffed with love, the pages all turned down and underlined.

  The boy would wake in an empty apartment and he would think badly of me. Odd predatory girl, a house full of twigs and fairy lights, the frightening intensity of the lovemaking, the strange postcoital pacing. All wound up.

  I knew that I should wake him and make good use of him, another shot of my drug, another round of mouths and fingers and genitals.

  I read somewhere that nymphomaniacs are obsessed by sex because they cannot achieve orgasm. This was not my problem. My problem was the space between orgasms, the terrible chasm of daily life, the social imperatives, the pointless living. I pressed my face against the window and looked out at all that wakeful night. A thousand places to run off into.

  “Soon,” I whispered into the balm of dark. “I will not bring strangers home tomorrow night. Tomorrow night I will escape and race through the electric buzz of the sleeping city in peace.”

  4. Misdirected Emotions

>   I knew where Geoffrey was at every minute. At least I thought I did. I would look up from my vodka or my coffee or whatever and think, he will be riding home from the city, or, he will be listening to that band he likes in the Valley.

  Sometimes I’d test myself on it and turn up at the place he would be. He was always there. I had a kind of sixth sense for him. I knew it was creepy to be hooked into his every movement as if I’d inserted a tracking device when we were having sex, but there was nothing to be done. I was plugged into him. My radar was always poised and waiting for some weird signal to arrive.

  I thought that Geoffrey was me. We were similar in many ways. We were both playful as monkeys, food fights, chases, games of backgammon, some of which ended in strange illegal moves that left us breathless with laughter. We were odd, awkward in company, prone to leaving a room in a sudden panic for no reason. We were both a little mad, we made nests in other people’s houses but we never seemed to settle anywhere ourselves. I once threw all his clothes out of the window of a third-story apartment, and then he threw all mine, and then we were naked in the night, daring each other to run off into the park.

  I loved him, but he didn’t love me. He said he would love a girl who was homely and smelled of bread dough and cake. He wanted a girl who hung her clothes up on hangers, a girl who ironed and who didn’t put up with any of his nonsense. He told me this when we were in bed together and he wasn’t the first one to mention my lack of feminine wiles and so I shrugged and kept at it, hoping that the delirium we shared in bed would make up for my lack of skills in the ironing department.

  We fucked so hard that we tore the sheets off the bed.

  “I’d love a girl who knows how to make hospital corners,” he said.

  5. No Spitting on a First Date

  I would look up at this new person, this naked body with its curious smells, scars in unexpected places, hair or hairlessness; perhaps a stray tattoo emerging from its hiding place, a pleasant surprise. This body was a history, a childhood, a teenage angst, this was the lover of strangers and someone’s child, awkward and perhaps trembling and maybe a little suspicious of the casual way I had picked him off the street and brought him to my home.

  There was the dance of fingers, tongues, the threat of teeth on skin. There was the touching of this strange new body, watching the gentle rise of a penis that had not yet divulged the whole of its story.

  I would be on my knees eventually at any rate. When all the teasing had been teased out there was always oral sex. My mouth would be full and it relieved me of the pressure to speak. I had almost always said too much already. I had used words that seemed obvious, words like “cock” and “fuck” and “cunt,” but when I said those words his eyes would widen and I knew that maybe I had overstepped the invisible line once again.

  He would never be as confident in sex as I was. Not the boys I liked, the fine examples of geekdom, the loners and the crazed and the sad young men. They warned me with a small pressure of their hands, the model of politeness, that I should pull away now. I would need to make a choice. I knew when it was close anyway because of the salty slipperiness on my tongue. Not an unpleasant taste but one that gave me pause. I would pause. I would take breath. I would need to pull away or be prepared to swallow when the moment came.

  This was a first date—it was almost always a first date—therefore I would swallow. It seemed impolite to spit on a first date. And there would be no mess to clean, no tissues; with any luck he would not want to kiss me when I had finished, which would save me from the more invasive intimacy of his tongue against mine.

  There would be space afterward for me to please myself. There would be a moment of rest in which he would be dazed and slow and happy and in this space I could play unhindered, finding other parts of his body to rub against, taking what I needed without the distractions of his inexperience.

  PILLION

  Brisbane 2008

  Paul and those girls. Just a handful of them, but enough for me to think that we could not be friends. Last night, I felt myself closing off, an irritable stepping away. But we are participating in a workshop together this morning and I said that I would give Paul a lift. So here I am right on time.

  My motorcycle is high at the pillion and he has to climb up, tugging at my shoulder, but when he is seated there is a pleasant pressure of his thighs around me and he holds me gently. There have been pillions who have hugged so tight I couldn’t breathe or lean into a corner. There have been pillions who are taller and bigger and shift the balance subtly but unpleasantly. Paul touches me on the waist, but without pressure. His weight settles the bike more steadily on the road.

  I once said that if my bike likes my pillion then I will like them, too—like someone with a beloved dog who helps them make informed decisions about their friends. A good pillion will be a solid friend. But perhaps it has nothing to do with friendship, because last night I felt the pricking of anger and I have decided that after this trip I will not waste my time on someone who is friends with the only three people in the world that I have difficulty liking.

  It is Paul’s first time on a bike and I feel him tense as we pull away from the curb. The first stretch is always the most difficult and he settles quickly. When we speed up for the highway I think about how sexual the whole thing is, the reality of sitting behind someone, gripping their ass with your thighs, the trust that is involved in the whole process of riding pillion. I find myself softening to him.

  We have barely been going fifteen minutes before there is a spotting on my helmet. It is going to rain. There is nothing to do but sit and let it soak through us: riding into it there is no way to keep it out. It gets in. Even with wet weather gear, which I have not brought, it gets in through your gloves, into your boots, trousers damp and sticking to your knees. I can feel twin rivulets of rain over my chest, finding a circuitous route around the swell of my breasts, puddling in my panties, a cold finger of water teasing me toward thoughts of sex. Paul will be getting wet. He will be cursing, he could be warm and dry inside a car.

  His hands are on my hips. The warmth of his fingers burns against the chill of the rain. Despite the fact that I am still irritated with him, I feel his legs rub against mine on every bump, I imagine his hands sliding forward and I am ready for this possibility if it happens. I remember the nice clean smell of him over drinks, the musky body heat. Some people are just like that, sweating out their sexuality for the world to smell.

  I know that if we stopped now I could turn around and taste him, lapping sweat and rain from his skin. I know the wetness isn’t just from the rain pooling in my lap. I so rarely become damp with desire, but I feel the little flutter low in my groin. The rain, the vibrations from the engine, the open road, and the memory of the smell of him.

  At some point I realize we are lost.

  RICHARD

  Brisbane 1989

  I’m not sure I would have gone out with Richard if he had been straight.

  I knew he was gay and that made me look at him twice. He was sweet, thin in that helpless way I like. Hips like a girl, cute in an awkward, beaky manner. And then there was his history, the magic of all the men he had loved before me. The secret slideshow of them flicked past in my imagination, a pornographic film with this boy as the star of every frame.

  This boy could be my boy. He liked me. He didn’t like girls but he liked this odd girl-boy who seemed to like sex as much as he did, if not more. We could become a team. A wonderful sexy team.

  I made love to his previous indiscretions. There were other men in the room with us. I imagined them all into existence. I introduced myself to them while I was in bed with him. I turned him over and I became them, telling Richard’s stories back to him as he rolled onto his stomach and closed his eyes. I inhabited the young boy who lived upstairs. I lifted Richard’s hips with the boy’s hands and reached for the lube and I entered him with slow fingers, prizing him apart and finding a cruel rhythm just as the boy upstairs had done. I felt
the power of it, the joy of being completely in control. I liked the stillness of his body beneath me.

  “I want to watch you make love to a man,” I told him, and he was in no position to refuse.

  It was easy. I found the first man in the café. I served him coffee and he stayed and made notes in a paperback that he bent back, cracking the spine. He had been there for an hour.

  “Another coffee?”

  He nodded. I wasn’t sure that he did want another coffee, but he wanted some more time with his cracked book and his blue pen and his furrowed brow. I chose the music for him. He had a Cure T-shirt on and I put the Cure on the stereo and watched his head nod in time to the rhythm of it.

  I brought him a coffee and perched on the stool next to him. “You got much left to do?” I nodded to his book.

  “Maybe half an hour. Not so long.”

  “I’m off work in forty minutes,” I told him. “Perfect timing.”

  “Yes.” He sat back and looked at me and I wondered what he would be seeing. A short girl, round, not particularly attractive.

  Still.

  “I live with a gay man,” I said. “We share partners. No strings, just sex. I’m thinking we should sleep with you this evening.”

  I could see him struggling to find a response.

  “Do whatever it is you’re doing. Drink your coffee. If you decide against it you can just walk out in half an hour and we’ll probably never see each other again. If you want to stay, then stay. Easy as that.” I went back to the dishwasher and the food preparation and the endless table servicing.