Holehearted: “Maybe that’s not what he wants from her.”
Sizematters: “What else could he want?”
Headgirl: “Maybe he wants to know her.”
Ninewide: “People don’t know each other on a porn site!”
Headgirl: “People don’t know each other, period.”
Scratchandsniff and everydayfiend didn’t respond to the messages. That a romance was budding no one could miss, however. And romance was deviant in our midst.
Alex wrote next.
Readers,
I took her home. I had to go to the bar four times before she’d leave with me. The first three nights she told me her name was Alice. We walked across Canal Street, then down West Broadway to my place. I suggested a cab, but she said, “Christ, I could live on that money for a week.” I didn’t give it to her, didn’t want her to think I was buying her, though the thought crossed my mind. So much easier that way. The first night I was carrying bread, the kind Lila likes. Peg acted like it was catnip, so I got some for her. I’m wondering if it’s me or the bread they go for.
We get inside my place, and I ask if she wants anything. She says bread and tea. She sits in the kitchen, and I put water up to boil and slice the bread. The fennel smells like licorice, and it feels as if I’m making tea for my grandmother. She puts her head on her thin arms, and her body looks like it doesn’t have bones. Don’t get me wrong, sex is in me. A junkie pal used to say that sex is the buzz you hear in the jungle when everything is quiet and asleep. Sometimes I can’t tell if I want to punch my fist through a wall, tear pieces of meat off abone, or stick my tongue in a funky hole. I ask Peg if she wants toast. She says okay in a sleepy voice. The toast smells even more intense. I put out some butter, and honey for her tea, and she opens her eyes and smiles, and I wonder why I want to be kind to her. I’m suspicious of it, like there’s a trick that’s going to spring out at me. After she eats, she curls up on the couch and falls asleep. I don’t touch her.
Later,
Alex
I didn’t know if I wanted to watch these two tangled in each other’s limbs or if I wanted to see what else could happen. Sex was why they had come together—sex in the sense of the buzz. Thinking about Alex and Peg, I felt a bittersweet tug, wanting them to stay and knowing that in time they would have to leave. Or change. I liked their candor, which did not cost them anything. I saw them as bold in comparison to myself, though I think we reveal ourselves, too, in our methods of concealment.
“Dear Pervs,” Peg wrote,
I asked Alex if he’d ever sucked a guy’s cock, apart from his own. He said he couldn’t reach his cock, though he’d tried a number of positions. He wasn’t limber enough, and his torso was too long, or, as he put it, “You could also say my cock is too short.” As for other guys’ cocks, he said that when he was doing dope, he got all liquidy and that almost anything was possible. He said junkies’ll go pretty far to stay high and they’d think an idea was swell that, if they were straight, they wouldn’t be able to wrap their brains around. So he guessed at some point he’d sucked a cock, sucked a crack pipe, sucked milk out of a tit. Made me feel better. I could see how living a long time had given him this acceptance, though God knows you can be old as dirt, like my old man, who is not a helluva lot older than Alex—maybe like eight years—and who would kill himself if he ever sucked a cock.
I told him about Goldie, even though it’s not like I’m involved with her or anything. He said he had someone, too, a woman named Lila. She wasn’t a shit, but he was going to break up with her, because he didn’t feel anything, and it was making him feel bad to feel nothing. Feeling nothing sounded good to me. Alex picks me up after work, and we go back to his place. I fall asleep, and he leaves me alone. Like I’m his kid sister, or something, but I know it’s not that. Even if I really were his sister, there would still be this vibe there. I sit in his bathtub, because the tub in my place is cold and grotty. I don’t mind when he pees while I’m there. Afterward, he puts down the toilet seat and watches me, and we talk. I tell him about the times I tricked, and he explains why he started shooting heroin and how kicking was the hardest thing he’d ever done. He doesn’t want me to be impressed. We eat breakfast in the morning, and then I leave. He hasn’t touched me, not even a kiss. Exciting.
Gotta run.
Love,
Peg
On the bulletin board, ninewide wrote: “Jeez, I could watch Oprah if I wanted this shit.”
Sizematters: “Hey, man, everything we talk about could be on Oprah.”
Headgirl: “They’ll hate each other if they fuck. She’s better off with him as a friend.”
Holehearted: “Bring back Lila! She’s the kinda girl you could give a butt plug to for Christmas.”
Sizematters: “You’d give your mother a butt plug for Christmas.”
Holehearted: “I have a big heart.”
Chickenfingers: “Bring back Goldie. Let her beat the crap outta Alex, that pussy.”
As if prompted, Peg’s next installment began:
Hey, Maniacs,
I haven’t seen Goldie in I don’t know when, like maybe two weeks. I told Alex I had a story in Bristle, and he went to the website to read it. Like Goldie’d ever do that. Like she can read! My story is about having sex in Central Park with an alien who looks like one of the chicks on Baywatch, with tawny skin and green eyes, and she has two little velvet-covered horns on her head. Alex touched the back of my neck, ru fling my hair, saying the story made him laugh and that my writing was musical. I felt good, and it scared me.
We go out to the deli. Alex is at the counter, ordering bagels, and I’m at the front, getting apples and chips, when Goldie comes in. She’s wearing tight jeans, worn out at the butt, and I feel that jolt go through me. She comes up and stands close enough for me to smell Marlboros on her breath, and I say she looks good, because I’m one of those dolls where you pull its string and out comes a recorded message. But all of a sudden, I don’t want anything. It’s because Alex is there, though I don’t know exactly what this means. I’m not trading one mean fucker for another, because Alex isn’t mean. Yet. He sees me talking and he doesn’t come over, and I think that’s cool.
Goldie is used to seeing me whipped, so she doesn’t know what to do with the new information. She catches me glancing at Alex. “You with that guy?” I tell her we’re friends, and she laughs so hard she looks pretty. She takes a step back, and then she squeezes my left tit like she needs it to develop the muscles in her hand. I let out a little gasp, but I don’t want to give her too much. She says she’ll come by the bar tonight, and I shrug. She buys a pack of cigs and a cup of co fee and leaves. I don’t say anything to Alex, and he doesn’t ask me anything. I say I have to split, and he says okay, but he looks sad.
Later,
Peg
The next letter was from Alex.
Hello from downtown. I’m writing a new piece of music, and I’m forgetting the other parts of my life, except wanting to get o f, and I don’t know whether it’s from the excitement of composing or the anxiety of maybe failing. Before, I’d shoot skag, but now it’s only sex. I feel like one of those chimps that got launched in early space shots. He must have known he was in the hands of people who did not, shall we say, have his best interests at heart. He’s catapulted up in a rocket and his brain fills with fear, and what can he do but jam his paw into his space pants and hang on to his pud for dear life, fiddling away and doing a little dance.
I’m cheerful today, and I attribute this to Peg. Fellow drooling idiots, don’t worry, I have designs on her silky, unblemished flesh. I contrive scenes in which I take her in every imaginable way, scenes of delight for me. I like that she is a child. It’s possible she only likes girls. It’s possible she doesn’t like sex. But she comes to me every night. I gave her a key. Maybe what I like is that she asks for nothing. I don’t see need in her eyes, the thing that usually makes me want to smash someone. Maybe we are easy, because I don’t like
women and she doesn’t like men.
Gotta work,
Alex
Then suddenly the letters stopped. Neither scratchandsniff nor everydayfiend posted messages of any sort. Some members of the chat room complained. They wanted a conclusion to the story. Others said good riddance. Each morning after making my coffee and feeding my cat, I would turn on my computer, but now, instead of a quickening pulse, I felt deflated, and I either opened my email with a sense of duty or just deleted it.
I am masked by temperament, not as a strategy, but after a while, to others, it amounts to the same thing. I might be straining your patience now, relating my experiences, yet offering no clues about my life. But what I tell you is the most salient thing I have to share— my responsiveness—which can be conveyed independent of my sex, or what I like to do in bed, or how I make my living, or whom I spend time with. None of these things weighs in, especially with my reactions to Alex and Peg.
I wished for their return, not to see a resolution to their tale but just the opposite. I wanted them never to conclude it. They made me feel a little less numb, a little more alert. They were my companions, even though I only eavesdropped on their lives. Unlike the characters in a book to whom one might become attached but whose fates were typeset by the time you read the first page, Peg and Alex were in a constant state of becoming. Or so it seemed to me.
I had never written to either scratchandsniff or everydayfiend, but now seemed the time. “Dear scratchandsniff and everydayfiend,” I wrote,
I am saddened by your absence and wish you would return, for I have greatly enjoyed your revelations. You give flesh and personality to horniness. How many times have I masturbated in the arms of a blank? No name. No face, sometimes. Often, no words. The script is engraved on the brain, the code scribbled on the laughing part of the double helix. I am a droid. (Not really.) Have you grown tired of displaying yourselves? I see Peg at the bar, with her miniskirt and fishnet hose, leaning over to get a glass and flashing her rear, as if it were in a spotlight. The mini’s made of leather, and I smell it. Ah! Peg wears red lipstick, though she chews it off and has to reapply it often, in a little round mirror—a gift from Goldie. I see Alex in his loft. He’s sitting at his keyboard, when his gaze drifts to the leather-covered bench across the room and beside it the set of barbells. He feels less like a ghoul when his body looks fit. He’s been lifting lately and sometimes walks around barechested in front of Peg. She asks him to show her his scars, and she runs her fingers over the insides of his arms. The first time she touches him.
I could go on, but you know them better than I could ever hope to! Please return.
Faithfully yours,
privateparts
When there was no immediate response, I became melancholy, as I do at the exit of a beloved person. I sought consolation in the flesh. The need would sneak up or would dog me all day, until I could find a few minutes to be alone. What is it about the thoughts that are summoned, the pulsing of the body, the going out for those moments of bliss until the shudders subside and you return to the place you left, no better no worse, though feeling peculiarly detached from the desire that only minutes before seemed so urgent, and you wonder when the desire will return?
About a month after the letters stopped and just as my hope was nailed in its coffin, everydayfiend returned. There was no explanation for the break, and I took it for a game of suspense. “Readers, I took her. Peg, that is. Took her in every part,” the note began.
Last night around three, I hear the key in the door. I’m not asleep. I know when the traps are being loaded and how to nab the cheese without getting my snout snapped o f. It’s gotten so all I think about is the soft skin of her inner thighs and the tiny hairs that glisten there. I can taste her pussy, though I have never so much as sni fed it. Her youth, coupled with her brash attitude, make her seem innocent. She trusts me. I want her to split herself open for me. The tape just loops in my brain. I’ll risk anything to make the pictures there dance in real life. She’s trying to be quiet. She stifles a yawn, and the sight of her in silhouette, with her little shoulders slightly bent from fatigue, fills me with tenderness, and it’s confusing, because a part of me wants to fold her in my arms and protect her from harm, and another part wants to consume her, until there’s nothing left but her miniskirt and the stockings that make her look like a downtown cliché. She places her backpack and jacket on my workout bench and tiptoes to the bathroom, where I hear her run water into the tub. I’m on the bed. I ask myself why I can’t continue as her friend. Why I can’t allow her to come to me, if that is ever her choice.
I swing my body off the bed and knock lightly on the bathroom door, as I push it open. She’s in the tub, her knees drawn to her chest, with bubbles floating around. I smell gardenias. I’m wearing a shirt and boxer shorts. Ones she bought me, with little red hearts pierced by an arrow. Fresh towels hang on the hooks. She’s draped a large purple one over the edge of the tub. I see a dab of toothpaste in the sink and the wet bristles of her brush sticking out of its cup. There is a brick of glycerin soap in the dish beside it and another by the tub. We were walking past a shop with expensive stu f like this, and she looked at it longingly. She doesn’t turn around, just waves over her shoulder. I want to hold on to things before they change. I feel like wax.
I have not thought what I would do if she wanted to be with me, wanted me there for her, and I push down the idea, because the possibility that she will refuse me drains my cock. On the other hand, my cock will say anything to get what it wants. I think of Peg when she is away, as I write the score for the play, see her plump lower lip when composing themes. What is sex without an open question?
“Were you awake?” she asks, languidly. She trusts me. To do what? Not to do what?
I kneel on the mat beside the tub, feeling shy, as if she is the one with designs and I’m not sure how to respond. “You look sad,” she says, pulling damp fingers through my hair. She runs an index finger along the lines in my forehead, as if to erase them. I take her hand and kiss it. I think my chest will explode when she lifts her chin and laughs, and I see her nipples peek out from the bubbles. The feeling surprises me. It’s fear.
“You want me,” she says, matter-of-factly.
“I do.”
“I don’t like men,” she says, but not with distaste, rather to remind herself.
“You don’t have to think of me as a man.”
She laughs again. “What do you want to do?” she asks, as if willing to eat some ice cream, though not every flavor.
“I want to wash you everywhere, dry you, and carry you to the bed. I want to explore every inch of your skin, and hurt you a little if you like. You have to tell me what you want. I want you to feel the same way about my body. I will not do anything unless you ask for it.”
“I like the way you smell,” she says, enjoying the power of not wanting. I feel she has the upper hand, my little top, and to test her, I pick up a washcloth and soap it for a long time. I make her wait, so her mind can catch up with her breathing. I begin washing her slowly, and she says nothing as I work my way down her back and part her legs and slip my fingers into her slick parts. She says nothing, but she meets my eyes and says, “Take off your clothes.” I do, easing myself beside her, and when we kiss I plunge my tongue deeply into her mouth, though I can’t tell whether she wants me to or has no choice.
Later,
Alex
I did not believe a word of this and therefore wasn’t surprised when, the next day, Alex admitted he’d imagined the seduction and that Peg actually “got out of the tub and went to sleep.”
The next letter was from Peg.
Dear Freaks,
I don’t see Goldie for weeks, and I think, good, she’s gone. My life feels regular, which is weird. I write, go to my job, sleep at Alex’s. I’m not having bad dreams. Alex is working on a new score. He’s eating and working out. We’re good for each other, I guess. How much longer? No guy has ever left me alone. Th
ey want something they think is there. I’m like a magic trick they are sure they can figure out, and when they can’t they feel cheated.
Maybe that’s how I see Alex, like a promise I’m afraid is a lie. Or maybe that’s how everyone sees everyone else, until they understand that the promise is what they want and the lie is what has been there all along. I’m in this space, after shit happens and before more shit happens, and I’m trying to remember it for the time when I don’t have it anymore.
Then boom, Goldie’s back. She walks into the club like she was there the day before. In one minute, I bite. She is the promise and lie wrapped in one. She looks me up and down, taking her time. Other people know how many plants grow in Brooklyn, or what the population of China will be in 2005, or how much money it would take to cure AIDS. Me, I know how to feel all the parts of a second.
“So is that guy fucking you?” Goldie says, leaning toward me, as if she doesn’t want people to hear, although she is speaking loud enough for everyone in the bar to be clued in.
I say, “Goldie, how come you can’t talk about anything but sex?”
Her eyes uncloud, and she shoots me a goofy grin. She seems like a girlpal now, and I think she isn’t as mean as she is simple. She scoops up a handful of bar mix and cascades the pretzels, rice crackers, and peanuts into her mouth. She doesn’t chew. She’s a fucking machine you fill with fuel. “I’ve been thinking,” she says. I grip the edge of the bar in mock suspense. “Maybe we should do a threesome with whatshisname.”
“Alex.”
“I could show him how much you like me to eat your pussy, and how I make you so wet before I even touch you that you drip on my hand when I put my fingers inside you, and how I rub my spit and your cunt juice around your little asshole and make you wait for me to go inside, and how I never know whether you are going to laugh or burst into tears after you come.”
This is the longest string of words I have ever heard Goldie unspool. I say, “So what’s he supposed to do?” I’m getting hot listening to her, and I’m sort of imagining the scene as she talks, seeing Alex watching, and I wonder how one minute I can be thinking about him as a friend and see myself curled up on his couch, and the next minute I can slink him over the edge of the pot Goldie is stirring up.
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