“Well then,” he said. “You’ll be hurting tomorrow night.”
My stomach clenched in the best way. I excused myself and hid in the bathroom to call Peng, who had recently moved back to the United States after spending a few years in China. (At this point, she’d only heard the same “S&M” euphemism that Kyle did; she didn’t know the details of my fetish.)
“That settles it, right?” I whispered to her over my cell. “He wouldn’t have said that if he weren’t into it, would he?”
Peng humored me. She’s been humoring me since I was ten years old.
“Sure,” she said. “That makes sense.”
“I mean, I don’t think he’s had a chance to explore it yet,” I added. “But it seems like the underlying impulses are there, don’t you think?”
“Mm-hmm,” Peng replied.
I went back to the table. In the dim light of the bar, David had never looked better. Was it possible for one man to be so perfect for me? I slid back into the booth.
“You seem too good to be true,” I told him. “I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop.”
David smiled. He stood up and leaned over the table to kiss me.
“There is no shoe,” he said.
THE NEXT NIGHT, David took me out to a movie. It was a kids’ movie.
“What was that?” I joked, after we had returned to his dorm room. David turned red.
“I didn’t know it was a kids’ movie!” he protested. “It had a high rating on Rotten Tomatoes.”
“It’s a unique way to set the mood.” I giggled.
“We don’t have movie theaters where I’m from,” David joked, with a mock groan. “I’m not used to these big-city contraptions.”
I laughed.
“That’s what I get for dating a farmer,” I said.
David grinned.
“I’m straight out of Oregon Trail,” he agreed.
“I didn’t pay attention to the movie, anyway,” I admitted. “I was thinking about what you said last night.”
David’s hands slid around my waist.
“You were, huh?” he asked, with a wicked grin.
“Yeah,” I replied. “Do you still want to . . . ford that river?”
David laughed.
“Of course,” he said, leaning down. As we kissed, he pulled my dress up, over my shoulders. I was in my underwear.
“Should I blindfold you? Is that what you want?” David asked.
He was so cute.
“You can if you want to,” I replied. “But that’s not quite what I have in mind.” As we continued to kiss, my fingers moved to his waist and unbuckled his belt.
David smiled.
“Are you trying to get me naked, young lady?” he teased.
I swallowed and shook my head.
“No,” I said.
I pulled his belt off and folded it in half.
“The other day, you kind of smacked my butt,” I told him.
“I did?” David replied.
No, he didn’t. But cut me some slack—this was my first time topping from the bottom, and there’s no script.
“Mm-hmm,” I hummed, nodding. “You did. And I like that kind of thing. So I thought this time, you could do that, but with this.” I handed him the belt. (The more direct tactic of asking him to spank me was out of the question. I would not be able to bring myself to say that word out loud to him for another six years. That’s how potent some words—for me, that word—can be.)
“Oh,” David said, jerking his head back—either with excitement or surprise, I couldn’t tell. “Yeah, totally.”
“And if there is anything you really like, we can do that, too,” I rushed to add.
“I really like you,” David replied.
“Very clever,” I teased. “Ten points for that one.”
“Hey, I play basketball,” David said. “If you set me up for a shot like that, I’m going to take it.”
I laughed.
“The point is, if you have any fantasies, I hope you feel free to tell me,” I said. “I won’t judge anything. I want to make you feel comfortable.”
“Duly noted,” David said. “For now, I just want to make you feel uncomfortable.”
“Yay!” I cheered, softly clapping my hands together. “I’m so glad you’re into this.”
“Cool,” he said.
“Cool,” I replied.
Then we just stood there, looking at each other. I had no idea what to do or say. John had always taken charge in these situations.
I pressed my lips together and squinted.
“Um,” I said.
David and I both burst into embarrassed laughter.
“Okay,” I continued, nervously bouncing up and down on the balls of my feet. “It’s not awkward.”
“Why would it be awkward?” David agreed, with an awkward smile.
“So I’m going to lie down,” I said, as I climbed onto his futon and lay on my stomach. “And we’ll figure it out.”
“Should I—should I pull down your underwear?” David asked.
“Oh, so sexy,” I teased. “Am I blushing?”
“Shut it, Keenan,” David said, yanking my panties off my hips. “I’m going to hit you now.”
“Bring it,” I said.
“I’m bringing it,” he replied.
The leather of his belt slapped against my skin.
“Like that?” David asked.
I stretched out along the futon. It felt—well, “good” isn’t quite right, because it hurt. But it felt satisfying. Very satisfying. I’m a spanking fetishist, and I had just been single for a year. Some sexual activities can be enjoyed solo, but spanking is not one of them. Like trying to tickle yourself, it just doesn’t work. (Yes, I had tried. No, we will never speak of this again.) After such a long drought, it felt amazing to play. It was obvious that David didn’t have the same kind of hardwired fetish that I do. But maybe he had a seed of sexual deviance that I could coax into bloom.
“That was great,” I said. “Exactly like that.”
“So this is how you get down, huh?” David asked.
I cringed.
“You could say that,” I replied, embarrassed.
He hit me again.
And again. That time, I gasped at the sting and pressed my face into the futon.
“I’m not hurting you, am I?” David asked.
I looked over my shoulder and tried to smile reassuringly.
“You don’t need to worry,” I told him. “I like it.”
David hit me one more time, then dropped the belt. He knelt down on the futon and ran his hands across my shoulders. I reluctantly flipped onto my back and let him kiss me.
“You broke my metronome, Jillian,” David said that night. “You’re my trochee.”
Later, I sat alone in my dorm room.
It was—
You know, it’s important to consider—
Well, it was definitely—
I left my room and walked to the edge of campus, and beyond, to the base of a hill with a satellite dish at its crest. At day, the hiking trail that leads up to the dish is popular with students. At night, the hill is closed off by a locked fence to separate students from the mountain lions that roam the area.
“Fuck it,” I thought.
I climbed over the fence and hiked up the hill. As I approached the dish, I heard a chatter of happy voices. A cluster of drunk students I didn’t know were drinking beers and shots of liquor.
“Hi,” I said, walking over to them.
“Hey!” they yelled. “Who are you?”
“I’m stressed out,” I told them. “Who are you?”
“We are done with the LSAT!” one of them yelled, to a chorus of cheers.
I laughed.
“Congratulations,” I said. “Mind if I join you?”
“No problem!” one of them replied, handing me a shot. “The more, the merrier. And the less likely we’ll be mauled by a mountain lion.” The others laughed.
I took the shot and winced. It was tequila.
“Why else?” I said. “Sex.”
The group cheered and clinked bottles.
“Sex!” one shouted.
“Hey, do you guys want to do something with me?” I asked.
“Sex?” another man asked, laughing. I squinted at him in the dark.
“Berowne?” I said. “Is that you?”
“You know it!” he called.
I shook my head with amusement and turned back toward the group.
“I want to scream something, okay?” I asked them. “Scream with me.”
Everyone agreed, and staggered to their feet. I told them what we were going to yell.
“That dude from A Midsummer Night’s Dream?” one guy slurred.
“Exactly,” I said. “One, two, three!”
His name, screamed by a dozen voices, echoed through the hills. Berowne wrapped his arm around my shoulders and handed me another shot.
“What fool is not so wise, to lose an oath to win a paradise?” he asked, with a wink. “Bottoms up, oath breaker.”
I sighed.
“Bottoms up, buddy,” I replied. We clinked glasses, and I threw the tequila down my throat.
Two things were certain: I was in love with my boy with the baseball cap.
And he was as vanilla as a Snack Pack pudding cup. There wasn’t even a sprinkle in sight.
3.4 Antony and Cleopatra:
Here Is My Space
I gasped and sat up in bed. To my left, on his side of the mattress, David was still asleep. He hadn’t noticed me move.
It was our senior year of college. I was twenty-one, and David was twenty-two. We had been dating for more than a year and living together almost as long. We both recognized the recklessness of moving in together so fast, but, as Shakespeare points out in Antony and Cleopatra, “there’s beggary in love that can be reckoned”—in other words, love that can conform to reason is stingy love indeed. So we had submitted to our less practical impulses and signed the lease.
Besides, I was suppressing enough impulses.
In our shared apartment, our things, like our lives, blended: David’s biochemistry books mingled on the shelves with my Kafka and Edith Hamilton; we used each other’s laptops all the time; I stole his comfortable T-shirts more often than I wore my own.
Wait—we used each other’s laptops all the time.
It was a terrifying realization. My search history felt like a crime scene. I could only imagine what David would think if he were to discover that journal articles and fantasy travel itineraries weren’t the only things I looked up online.
David already knew that I had an interest in “edgy” sex play, of course. But it was a far cry from that trendy euphemism to the graphic spanking stories I read to lull myself to sleep whenever I had insomnia. (Trust me, it’s more fun than counting sheep.)
After that first awkward experience, David did spank me sometimes—if slapping my ass a few times during foreplay or sex counts as spanking, which, to me, it doesn’t. But it was enough to keep my physical needs almost satisfied. I filled in the holes with capsaicin cream, a medication that produces a painful burn when applied to skin, and with the Internet.
I also joined an exercise class.
“Stand up!” yelled Marcus, the instructor, standing over me with a weight bar. “We’re not done!”
“No, please, I can’t,” I moaned, shaking my head. “It hurts.”
“It’s for your own good,” Marcus replied. “Ten more!”
And figging, of course. How shall I explain figging?
Figging, let’s say, is “the act of using peeled raw ginger root for anal stimulation.” In other words, you peel a finger of raw ginger into the shape of a butt plug and stick it where God and Julia Child never advised.
According to the Internet, figging began life as a disciplinary tactic in ancient Greece, and was widely used in Victorian England to dissuade spanking victims from clenching their butt cheeks during their punishments. (That’s probably apocryphal; I can’t bring myself to make the phone calls necessary to confirm the historical origins of anal ginger play.) For years, the BDSM communities have embraced figging, often as a supplement to spanking. It hurts. The ginger oils warm up and then burn. It’s painful and amazing. I regard this paragraph as a public-service announcement. It’s not fair for the BDSM communities to keep figging to ourselves. It’s just too good. (If there was ever a hope that my sexuality might be merely a “phase,” I’d say it died the second I began to pervert arthritis cream and East Asian produce aisles for masochistic masturbatory purposes. Never assume the girl next door doesn’t have a knobby rhizome up her butt.)
David was almost everything I had ever wanted in a partner: curious, strong, sexy, and smart. Unfortunately, he also had no apparent desire to beat me to tears at my request. I hadn’t planned for that one.
There’s a moment in Antony and Cleopatra when Cleopatra, perhaps the most fully realized sexual character in the Shakespearean canon, talks to a eunuch.
“Hast thou affections?” she asks Mardian, a member of her entourage.
“Yes, gracious madam,” he replies.
That takes Cleopatra by surprise.
“Indeed?” she asks.
“Not in deed, madam, for I can do nothing but what indeed is honest to be done,” Mardian replies, punning on Cleopatra’s question. “Yet have I fierce affections, and think what Venus did with Mars.” (Venus, the goddess of love, and Mars, the god of war, were legendary lovers; in fact, according to myth, Cupid was their son.)
Even when sexuality sleeps, it’s never gone.
So I panicked. I had been drifting into sleep, midway through an excellent fantasy about naval insubordination and the captain from Master and Commander, when the vulnerability of my search history occurred to me with a jolt. Had I missed anything else?
It took me almost an hour, but that night, frantic in our living room, I learned to hide my tracks. I erased my search history, reset my computer preferences, and consolidated my favorite spanking stories into one folder. I titled it: “David, If You Find This, Please Don’t Look Inside.”
Then I walked back into our bedroom and looked at my boyfriend. He was still asleep.
I exhaled with palpable relief. My secret was safe. It ached to be so grateful for an empty history.
I would stay in this lonely sexual purgatory—hiding, sneaking around, sticking ginger up my butt in the isolation of locked bathrooms—for the next five years.
DAVID ONCE SHOWED me a satellite image of the United States at night. On most of the map, lights from the major cities make the geography familiar and identifiable. But there are black holes in the middle.
“That’s where I’m from,” David said, pointing at a black hole.
“This reminds me of satellite pictures of the Korean peninsula at night,” I told him.
During Shakespeare’s life, maps weren’t taken for granted. In fact, they were a popular new fad. Maps adorned walls in homes, appeared in art and literature, and fascinated the intelligentsia. Many of Shakespeare’s plays tapped into the global interests they provoked; he wrote often, of course, about countries other than his native England. But nowhere does Shakespeare explore the globe with more exuberance than he does in Antony and Cleopatra.
In both figurative and literal senses, Antony and Cleopatra’s central lovers come from very distant places.
Mark Antony is one of three rulers of the Roman Empire. Cleopatra is the Queen of Egypt. Despite the dramatic differences between the Roman and Egyptian cultures and outlooks, Antony and Cleopatra fall in love. But after the death of his Roman wife, Fulvia, Antony leaves Egypt to return to Rome and marry Octavia, the sister of one of his fellow rulers, in the hope that the marriage will ensure political stability.
It doesn’t work. War breaks out among the three Roman rulers, and Antony returns to Egypt—a move that drags
Cleopatra into the war as well.
The Roman forces follow Antony to Egypt, and, despite the fact that Antony is better prepared for a land conflict, Antony chooses to fight at sea, in what is known as the Battle of Actium. Cleopatra’s ships turn and flee, and Antony follows her, leaving his own ships to destruction. Later, after a series of political shenanigans, Antony becomes convinced that Cleopatra has betrayed him, and vows to kill her. To prove her loyalty, Cleopatra sends word to Antony that she has committed suicide and died with his name upon her lips. Antony decides to join his lover in the afterlife and falls on his own sword. The wound doesn’t immediately kill him, however, and Antony dies in Cleopatra’s arms. When the Roman army takes Cleopatra prisoner, she kills herself as well.
The differences between Rome and Egypt are obvious and endless. As literary scholar Rosalie Colie wrote, “Rome is duty, obligation, austerity, politics, warfare, and honor. . . . Egypt is comfort, pleasure, softness, seduction, sensuousness (if not sensuality also), variety, and sport.” Cleopatra is sexual; her “passions are made of nothing but the finest part of pure love.” Antony, for his part, finds himself pulled from the “holy, cold, and still conversation” of Roman culture and into the warm, overflowing Egyptian waters of the Nile.
But my favorite geographic detail from Antony and Cleopatra is that, as Antony dashes from place to place, we never see Cleopatra in Rome. In fact, the threat of being taken to her boyfriend’s hometown is what drives her to suicide at the end of the play.
Cleopatra had the right idea.
David’s hometown, in the black hole of central North Dakota, has a population of about five hundred people, if you round up. I’ll call it “Credence.”
There are no stoplights in Credence. The nearest supermarket is an hour away by car. There are six Protestant churches, but no bookstores. There is one paved road, Main Street, which has a handful of small businesses and a bar.
It is listed in the county phone book as “Bar, The.”
The first time David brought me to Credence, the local news section of the county newspaper reported: “On Saturday, Bob and Deena Smith called their cousin Jerry, who lives in Omaha. He said it was cloudy there.” (Really. That’s an actual article from the newspaper, in its entirety, although I changed the names.) The same newspaper announced my visit in a subsequent issue, complete with a photo-illustration.
Sex with Shakespeare Page 17