He insisted on holding my jacket so that I could put it on. Two girls who had just entered the bar admired his gesture. I took his arm and we went out onto the street. He said he’d really enjoyed our evening together and that we would have to do it again. “The time went by so quickly,” he said.
“Well, there wasn’t much of it,” I replied.
We arrived at my apartment building. Frederick kissed me as if there were a television camera trained on us. I responded in a perfunctory daze. It was chilly, but his neck was bare and unprotected, like a little boy’s. “So,” he said, “what are you going to do with the rest of your night?”
“Read, I guess.” With the most hopeless gesture of the evening, I stretched up and brushed his exposed neck with my lips and nose. Faintly, but alertly, he stiffened; I could feel him remember our strange intimacy with a swift, barely perceptible inner twitch. In the dark, I felt his eyes dart uncertainly. “Goodbye,” I said. I turned and walked up my front steps.
“Wait,” he said. “Do you . . . do you have your keys?”
“Yeah.” I half turned to answer him; my voice trembled with anger. “I have my keys.” I went in and shut the door.
I went immediately into the bathroom and knelt over the toilet, thinking that I might be sick. But I could not discharge the bad feeling so easily. I sat on the floor and held my face in my hands. I uttered a soft animal moan. My old cat came and sat next to me, looking at me anxiously. “It’s all right,” I told her. “Don’t be afraid. It’s not a big deal.”
Processing
For the next several days, the memory of my encounter with Frederick lingered like a bruise that is not painful until, walking through the kitchen in the dark one night to get a drink of water, you bang it on a piece of furniture. I would be talking animatedly with someone when I would suddenly realize that I was really talking to and for Frederick, as if he were standing off to the side, listening to me. This was a nuisance, but a mildly advantageous one; my efforts to communicate with the phantom Frederick gave my conversation a twisted frisson some people mistook for charm.
The week after I met Frederick, I went to a party celebrating the publication of a book of lesbian erotica. I was talking to two women, one of whom was facetiously describing her “gay boyfriend” as better than a lover or a “regular friend.” She said he was handsome too, so much so that she constantly had to “defend his honor.”
“You mean he’s actually got honor?” said someone.
“One should always maintain a few shreds of honor,” I remarked. “In order to give people something to violate.”
“I don’t know if that qualifies as honor.”
“It’s faux honor, and it’s every bit as good for the purpose I just described.”
“Can I get you a drink?” There was a woman standing off to the side, listening to me. I was startled to see that she was the woman who had taken a Polaroid of Frederick and me. Even in a state of apparent sobriety she emitted an odd, enchanting dazzle.
“Yes,” I said. We took our drinks out onto the steps. A lone woman was sitting there already, smoking and dropping cigarette ash into an inverted seashell. When she saw us, she said hello and moved to the lowest step, giving us the top of her head and her back. Because she was there, we whispered, and our whispers made an aural tent only big enough for the two of us.
“I wondered if I’d see you again,” she said. “I wondered what happened with you and that guy.”
“Nothing,” I said. “It was a one-night thing. We didn’t even have sex.”
“I also wondered if you like girls.”
“I definitely like girls.” I paused. “Why did you want to get me a drink just now?”
“What do you think? Because I like your faux honor.”
“Because it has cheap brio and masochism?”
“Exactly!” I felt her come toward me in an eager burst, then pull away, as if in a fit of bashfulness. “But we shouldn’t be so direct,” she said. “We should maintain our mystery for at least two minutes.”
I felt myself go toward her in a reflexive longing undercut by the exhaustion that often accompanies old reflexes. “I’m Susan,” I said.
Her name was Erin. She was thirty-two years old. She was trying, with another woman, to establish a small press and, to this end, was living on a grant that was about to run out. She was reading a self-help book called Care of the Soul and Dead Souls by Gogol. She had been taking Zoloft for six months. She seemed to like it that I’d written a book of poetry, even if it had been ten years ago. She said that she sometimes described herself as a “butch bottom” but lately she was questioning how accurate that was. I told her I was sick of categories like butch bottom and femme top or vice versa. I said I was looking for something more genuine, although I didn’t know yet what it was. She said she thought she probably was too.
“That picture you took of me was sad,” I said. “I look sad in it.”
I expected her to deny it, but she didn’t say anything. She reached between my legs and, with one finger, drew tiny, concentrated circles through my slacks. It seemed a very natural thing. It seemed as if she thought anyone could’ve come along and done that, and it might as well be her. This wasn’t true, but for the moment I liked the idea; it was a simple, easy idea. It made my genitals seem disconnected from me, yet at the same time the most central part of me. I parted my lips. I stared straight ahead. The silence was like a small bubble rising through water. She kissed the side of my lips, and I turned so that we kissed full on. She opened her mouth and I felt her in a rush of tension and need. I was surprised to feel such need in this woman; it was a dense, insensible neediness that rose through her in a gross howl, momentarily shouting out whatever else her body had to say. I opened in the pit of my stomach and let her discharge into me. The tension slacked off, and I could feel her sparkle again, now softer and more diffuse.
We separated, and I glanced at the woman on the steps, who was, I thought, looking a little despondent. “Let’s go in,” I said.
Inside, we were subdued and a bit shy. We walked around together, she sometimes leading me with the tips of her fingers on my wrist or arm. Being led in such a bare way made me feel mute, large and fleshy next to her lean, nervous form. I think it made us both feel the fragility of our bond, and although we spoke to other people, we said very little to each other, as though to talk might break it. We assumed she would walk me home; when we left, she offered me her arm, and I fleetingly compared her easy gallantry with Frederick’s miserable imitation of politeness.
As we walked, she talked about people at the party, particularly their romantic problems. I listened to her, puzzling over the competence of her voice, the delicacy of her leading fingers, the brute need of her kiss. Her competence and delicacy were attractive, but it was the need that pulled me toward her. Not because I imagined satisfying it—I didn’t think that was possible—but because I wanted to rub against it, to put my hand on it, to comfort it. Actually, I wasn’t sure what I wanted with it.
We sat on my front steps and made out. “I’d like to invite you in,” I said, “but it would be too much like that guy—I meet you at a party, bring you home.” I shrugged.
She nodded solemnly, looked away, looked back and smiled. “So? I thought you said nothing happened anyway.”
“He made out with me and I sucked his dick, and then he acted like he didn’t want me.”
“That’s sort of harsh.”
“Yeah. He acted like he was being nice, and I believed him, but then when I saw him again, he acted like a weird prick.”
She embraced me sideways. “That sort of turns me on,” she said. She nuzzled my neck, and the feminine delicacy of her lips and eye-lashes was like a startling burst of gold vein in a broken piece of rock. I slid my hands under her shirt. She had small, muscular breasts and freakishly long nipples, and there was faint, sweet down all along her low back.
I invited her in. She entered the living room with a tense, merc
urial swagger that pierced my heart. We sat on the couch. “So,” she said. “Do I get to be the bad boy? Are you gonna suck my cock?”
“Don’t,” I said. “He hurt my feelings.”
“Awww.” She knelt between my legs, with her hands on my thighs. Her fingers were blunt and spatulate, with little gnawed nails. “If I say something wrong, it’s because I’m not sure what to do. I’m not used to this. I want to please you, but you also make me want to . . . I don’t even know.”
“I’m not sure what I want, either,” I said. “I think there might be something wrong with me.”
She held my face in her hands. “Let me make it better,” she said. She looked at me, and her expression seemed to fracture. Abruptly, she struck me across the face, backhanded me and then struck me with her palm again. She checked my reaction. “Open your mouth,” she said. “Stick out your tongue.” I did. She started to unzip her pants, then faltered. “Um,” she said, “Susan? Is this cool?”
“Yeah.”
When we were finished, I walked her out the door onto the porch. Using her ballpoint, we wrote our numbers on scraps of paper torn from a flyer that had been placed on my doormat to remind me to fight AIDS. She held my face and kissed my cheek and left.
When I woke the next day I didn’t think of her but I felt her, and I wasn’t sure what she felt like to me. I was acutely aware of the artificiality of our experience. It felt like a dollhouse with tiny plastic furniture and false windows looking out on mechanically painted meadows and cloud-dotted skies. It felt both safe and cruelly stifling, and both feelings appealed to me. More simply, I felt as if some habitual pain had shifted position slightly, allowing me to breathe more easily. As the day went on, I thought of her, but gingerly. The thought was like a smell that is both endearing and faintly embarrassing. I remembered how she had knelt and said, “I’m not sure what to do,” and I remembered her reckless blow to my face. She seemed split in two, and the memory split me in two. But when she called me, I was happy; I realized that I had not expected to hear from her.
“I would’ve called earlier,” she said. “But last night was intense for me and I had to process. Like I said, I usually bottom.”
Her voice was bright and optimistic, but there was something else in it. It was as if she’d made an agreement with somebody to supply all the optimism required on a general basis for the rest of her life, and the strain of it had become almost anguishing. But when she opened the door of her house to greet me, it was with brash, striding movement, and she was elegant and beautiful in a sleek suit.
We went to a Thai restaurant for dinner. It was a cheap place that maintained its dignity with orderly arrangement and dim lighting. Little statuettes and vases invoked foreignness unctuously yet honorably. The other diners seemed grateful to be in such an unassuming place, where all they had to do was talk to each other and eat. Erin pulled out my chair for me.
A waitress, vibrant with purpose, poured us water in a harried rattle of ice. We ordered sweet drinks and dainty, greasy dishes. Erin’s smile burst off her face in a wild curlicue. I imagined her unsmiling, wearing lipstick, with her hair upswept, in a hat with a little veil; she would’ve been formidable and very beautiful. Her jaw was strong but also suggestive of intense female sensitivity and erotic suppleness. Then under that was a rigidity that made me think of something trapped. I reached across the table and took her hand. We were both sweating slightly.
“I haven’t been involved with a woman for a long time,” I said. “Mostly I’m with men. Although I haven’t been involved with men lately, either.”
“I don’t care,” she said. “Basically I’m a dyke, but I like sex with men sometimes so I can understand.”
I asked her if she always needed to role-play in sex. I said I was trying not to relate to people in such a structured way. “I mean, I can do that kind of sex, um, obviously, and I can like it. It gets me off and everything. But it’s a mechanical response. It’s not deep.”
“Well,” she said, “I hope you didn’t feel like what we did was mechanical, because it wasn’t for me. I hardly ever top anybody, so it was really new.” She drank her sweet iced coffee with ingenuous relish.
“It wasn’t really mechanical, because I could feel you under the fantasy. But I’ve done those fantasies all my life, and I want to try to be more genuine and direct, so whatever we do, it’ll really be us. Emotionally, I mean.”
“I can respect that,” she said. Her voice was like that of a little girl trying to be good for her mother. It gave me a strange, sad pleasure. It made me want to pretend to be her mother, just like another little girl.
Erin was from Kansas. She used to be an Evangelical Christian. She wasn’t raised a Christian, but she had converted on her own initiative when she was fourteen. Her parents had separated when she was ten, and her mother had to work brutal night shifts that made her more disappointed with life than she already was. Erin spent most of her time with ardent Christian boys, with whom she went to religious meetings. She was occasionally moved to give bouquets of hand-picked flowers to various bewildered girls, but it wasn’t until prom night that it hit her that her repeated day-dreams about the elaborate scorn of a certain beautiful brat were actually erotic in nature. She made a successful pass at a drunk, pretty little mouse in the rest room and never wore a dress again—although she valiantly tried to be a queer Evangelical well after she realized it would never work.
I pictured her standing alone in plain, neat clothes in a landscape of dry sunlight and parched yellow earth. Vague shapes were present in the distance, but I couldn’t see what they were. She was extending her arm to offer a bunch of flowers to someone who wasn’t there. The expression on her face was humble, stoic, and tenaciously expectant, as if she was waiting for something she had never seen yet chose to believe would someday appear. It was the expression she had on her face while she was talking to me. She was telling me that when she told her mother she was gay, her mother said, “I could just shit,” and went into the next room to watch TV
She had other expressions too. When we talked about the ongoing rape trial of a pop star, I made predictable sarcastic comments about people who said that the girl had probably brought it on herself. Erin first agreed with me, then reversed herself to say that maybe the girl had asked for it. Her expression when she said that was rambunctious, with a sensual shade of silly meanness—but mostly it was the expression of a kid with her hands in Play-Doh, squishing around and making fun shapes.
After dinner we went to drink. As we walked down the street, we held hands. There was real feeling between us, but it was unstable, as if we had been rewarded with a treat of flavored ice, which we wanted to put off eating for as long as possible so that we could savor it, but which was already melting anyway.
We went to a bar where people in various states of good-natured resignation sat in the dark under crushing disco music. I ordered drinks with lots of amaretto in them. The sweetness gave my mild drunkenness a pleasant miasmic quality.
Erin said she liked what I had said about trying to be more genuine. She said her therapist had recently suggested to her that it might be good for Erin to spend at least a few weeks getting to know women before she had sex with them, and that although she hated the idea on principle, she was considering it.
I reminded her that we’d already had sex.
“But we could start fresh,” she said. “And get to know each other before we do it again.”
I thought of going with her to restaurants and movies. We would sit and discuss current events, and under all our talk would be the memory of my open mouth and exposed tongue. I moved close to her on the banquette and put my head on her slim, spare shoulder. She held me. Her hair had a tender chemical smell. I pictured her washing it, bent naked over a bathtub, moving her arms with the touching confidence of rote grooming practices.
She walked me to my door and we kissed. Her kiss felt honorable and empty. I asked her in. “We don’t have to have sex,”
I said. She came in and we lay on the living room floor with our arms around one another. We touched each other gently and respectfully, but with each caress I felt as if we became more separated. That made me touch her more insistently and more intimately. I felt her neediness rise through her abdomen in a long pulse; we brushed our lips together in a stifled dry kiss and then opened our mouths to feed.
“I want to do what you said,” she whispered. “I want to just be us.” I took her face in my hands. I wanted to say “my darling girl,” but I hardly knew her. I pulled up my shirt and pulled my bra down. I pulled up her shirt. I knelt over her and rubbed against her chest and belly, just touching. She closed her eyes, and I could feel her waiting in her deep body, wanting me to show her what “ourselves” might be. And I would’ve, except that I didn’t know. I could remember her at the restaurant talking about her mother and religion, expressing her opinions. Again, I imagined her standing alone, offering her flowers to no one. She was very dear and I wanted her, but I could only see her in pornographic snapshots, stripped of her opinions and her past. I unzipped her pants and pulled them down. I turned her over and positioned her. Her breath subtly deepened; she was taut and vibrant and absolutely present. I lightly rubbed my knuckles against her genitals. I felt an impersonal half-cruelty that was more titillating than real cruelty.
But she wanted to be cruel too, or rather to pretend that she was. She would take her artificial debasement to a certain point, and then she would change direction. She would kiss me and I would feel her tender self in a burst of nakedness that stopped my breath—and then she would veer away, immersing herself in some internal personality that didn’t know or care about me. She was a nasty teenaged boy, she was a silly kid, she was a full, deep woman all the way down to her private organs. She slapped me and she pulled my hair—but she demanded that I beat her between her shoulder blades. And when I did she whispered “thank you,” her face transfigured with sorrow so abject that I was for one violent second absolutely repelled, and then drawn back with equal violence.
Because They Wanted To: Stories Page 23