Super-Exhibitionistic Horse-Cock Boy was a bit of inspired ad-lib. One night I made up a story about masturbating in front of my living room window while a neighbor woman watched me from her kitchen across the courtyard. Messages flooded in. Everyone wanted to hear about it. Part of the allure of an amateur sex line involved its invitation to be playful with the rituals of the form: it felt appropriate to situate the fantasy itself inside an act of voyeurism.
The Sound of One Hand Slapping was a late addition to my repertoire, and by no means original; I heard many masterly variations. I merely put my own spin on an old phone-sex standard. The trick, of course, was in the execution. I tried at first for authenticity, recording an actual masturbatory stroke, but it was too subtle for the mouthpiece to pick up, and I kept getting a prerecorded admonition: I’m sorry, your message must be at least ten seconds long. Please try again. At first I misheard this as: I’m sorry, your member must be at least ten inches long. Please try again. I experimented until I found a plausible substitute, which involved rubbing my index finger back and forth across the mouthpiece. When I replayed the message to confirm it, I heard a sound that hinted at some sort of deviant friction. By pressing my fingertip with greater or lesser force, I could create a stylized rendition of vigorous, almost violent copulation, or gentle, sensuous cock-stroking. (Later I even recorded an actual slap, although I struck my thigh instead of my ass, having learned that on the talk line impression is reality.) The virtue of this method arose from its ambiguity, its invitation for others to initiate the fantasy. It allowed me, in the opening joust of a phone fuck, to shield my voice from other callers.
I’d dialed so often my voice had become a known quantity.
Once I got hooked I had to make a real effort not to call every night. Evenings when I stayed away from the phone tended to play out in the same way. I’d be abducted by one of my blue moods, a combination of loneliness and claustrophobia at the thought of all the human longing playing out in the towers and the streets, in the privacy of little urban rooms. I’d run out of patience for reading, my usual strategy of escape, so I’d pace my apartment, listening to Lester Young and Coleman Hawkins, until I tired of retracing my steps. I’d take my notebook and go for a beer at one of the Irish joints in my neighborhood: O’Hanlon’s, McCann’s, McCaffrey & Burke. There was always something soothing in the murmur of voices and the clank of glassware, men and sometimes even a few women talking in the smoky, intimate light. I liked to imagine I’d find a beautiful woman sipping whiskey all alone in the corner. Our eyes would meet. I’d buy her a drink. We’d step, just for a moment, from the frame of the Hopper painting that circumscribed our lives. Or maybe we’d step into the frame, create a moment of melancholy beauty we could hold with us forever.
No matter. She was never there.
One night my friend Rachel called me at home. It was rare to hear her voice but always a pleasure when it happened. We’d met during our respective internships at the Nation and the Village Voice and had kept in touch, mostly by letter, me from Montana, her from Seattle, then later me from New York and her from Virginia.
Toward the end of our brief season in the city I’d confessed my attraction to her, a confession she did not reciprocate, though I sensed no worse than ambivalence in her cryptic silence. Problem was, she had a boyfriend. But now her boyfriend had gone abroad, to study international relations at the London School of Economics, while she pursued a master’s in poetry at the University of Virginia. I’d met the boyfriend once. He was a very small fellow with unwashed hair, tiny round glasses, and tremendous, outsized hands. You couldn’t not notice his beautiful hands.
Rachel told me those hands had found another woman to reach for in her absence. He’d called and confessed this to her, two months after the fact. She told him it was over. He immediately flew to Virginia in an act of contrition. They wept, they cursed; they held each other tenderly, they screwed not very tenderly. Then he left for London. Nothing was resolved. She was alone with her wounds, alone in Charlottesville, Virginia. He called again and again and pleaded with her to give him another chance. He swore he’d prove his devotion, if only she would grant him one more chance.
She could not do that. Instead she called me.
She said she’d never stopped thinking about what it would be like to be involved with me. I hadn’t known she’d ever started—and besides, I wanted to say now, it would probably be a nightmare to be involved with me. But I stayed mum.
She said she’d been adept at disguising her attraction, but it had been there all along.
Adept is too pale a word, I told her.
She wanted to come out and say something but didn’t know if it was appropriate. She admitted she felt oddly giddy and drunk, as if she were capable, suddenly, of anything, and this scared her, made her think that she should play things close to the vest.
Go ahead, I said. Say it anyway. What’s to lose?
Our friendship, she said.
We’ll always be friends, I said.
Almost as if changing the subject, she said she’d be spending spring break in upstate New York, at her father’s country home. But she wasn’t changing the subject.
What train would I take to get there? I asked.
She told me the line and the station stop, said she’d happily meet me on arrival.
Nine days later I was there.
The country home was sprawling and drafty, nearly three hundred years old, with low ceilings and a thriving resident population of mice. Her father, a theater producer, made it clear that he was not to be bothered unless we had ideas about where he could find the money to stage an adaptation of one of Thomas Mann’s lesser novels. He gave me the once-over and then dialed someone on the phone.
After a tour of the grounds, Rachel and I walked down a long dirt road and sat in a field of what had been alfalfa the year before. The sun was warm on our faces, and we reclined at the crest of a hill where we could see out over a valley to the low mountains that rose on the far side. As the sun dropped behind her it turned her auburn hair a fiery gold. I wanted badly to kiss her but lacked the courage to move near enough to her mouth.
We walked down the hill amid the springtime smells of melting water and pine needles. I knew I would remember that afternoon with perfect clarity for the rest of my life—the blue sky, the geese and their honking overhead, the light on her hair and her nervous half-smile, the smell of dust off the road. The anticipation of how sweet and soft her lips would be.
After dinner that night she handed me a letter she’d written a couple of days earlier. She said she’d wanted to write one last time before everything changed. Then she left the room, and I sat in the lamplight, reading.
The letter closed by saying, This is a goodbye kiss to everything that has come before. It was a beautiful piece of writing, funny and sweet and passionate; it even included a long meditation on the beauty and eroticism of the word passion. I didn’t quite know what to think about what was happening between us. I’d always wanted to be more than friends. She’d always insisted we couldn’t be more than friends. I’d finally made my peace with that, and now the tables had turned. She was the one in pursuit, after I’d given up. I was more nervous now than when my feelings had gone unreciprocated. I’d become quite comfortable with my feelings going unreciprocated. Preemptive rejection kept the stakes manageable.
I sat alone with her letter for a long time. When she returned she held a glass of red wine for each of us.
I’m sick of boys, do you know that? she said. All I’ve ever had are boys. It’s time I had an adult relationship.
We drank the wine. We went upstairs together. It felt like an adult situation. We undressed and went to the bed. I was feeling more adult by the moment. After some exploratory caressing, we agreed that we’d be wiser to stop before we went too far, wait for another time when we’d be more comfortable, more sure in each other’s presence—our adult selves asserting some objective analysis on potential outcomes.
>
I told her I had all the patience in the world.
Coming from any other guy, she said, I wouldn’t believe that for a moment. But from you I do.
As if to disabuse her of her foolishness, I began to kiss her stomach, her thighs. It wasn’t long before we were doing exactly what we had said we weren’t going to do.
As we lay tangled in the sheets, she said, I had no idea you were so religious.
What do you mean?
You kept saying, Oh my god, oh my god.
I guess I must have. But doesn’t everyone?
I thought Catholic school had taken all of that out of you.
No, I said, I’ve merely found a new altar at which to worship.
We raked the yard in the late morning sun, exposing the fecund smell of wet, decaying leaves, the wetness trapped since autumn. She exuded elegance even in yard work, elegance in posture, an elegant wool sweater just so on her shoulders, that shy half-smile she smiled to herself that signified her mind at play. I’d never known a woman more attractive in the act of thinking. I saw in my own mind her naked body, its dips and arcing lines, petite navel, small nipples on ample breasts, powerful yet graceful thighs and calves. Cheeks round and red as plums. A delicate, slender neck. Biceps firm from regular games of squash. Pale skin and eyes of a glacial blue, a sprinkle of freckles on her face. We walked through the woods along a little creek. She tried to leap across the water and landed in mud. Her shoe, covered in slime, made a sucking sound when she pulled it free. We laughed and laughed.
In an open swath of grass the sun-bleached bones of an animal, the size of a small dog, lay in the very shape in which it must have died—except the skull, which was a foot away and facing back upon the rest of itself, in terror or bemusement it was hard to tell. We noted this and moved on, a tiny fissure in the texture of the day.
In bed that night she said, I don’t want to lose control. Not yet. If I let you get me off, everything will change.
Hasn’t it changed already?
I mean really change.
She said every decision she’d made in the previous three years was now called into question. She doubted that anything she’d done was due to passion. With her boyfriend she’d found comfort, someone who wouldn’t challenge her, who provided stability and familiarity—the safe and reliable college beau. So much for stability, reliability. She’d gone with him to Seattle after college to escape the hard choices of life out of school, when suddenly all of one’s options are narrowed, when you finally have to figure out who to be. She’d wanted a sabbatical from decision making. She’d wanted a sojourn of sea-smelling air and Asian-Pacific cuisine, a lush landscape of emerald-green. Now something inside of her was ignited, and she wanted more. Her mind was on fire and her body with it. Her head crackled with ideas. She wanted to write for real. She wanted to create again. Her master’s program in Virginia challenged her to think more deeply. Her boyfriend’s departure and betrayal liberated her to feel more intensely.
So this is what it feels like to make love to a liberated woman, I said.
I’ll show you a liberated woman, she said.
After she’d shown me, I told her that every decision I’d made in the past three years could be traced to the death of my brother. I recounted how one of my uncles had mentioned that I was the likelier candidate for a self-inflicted death; I admitted that although his death had been unbearably sad in the beginning I’d found a way to take a kind of grim pleasure in it. It was the black heart of my life; it gave my life a bleak grandeur it would have lacked otherwise. I’d come to treasure that grandeur. Careless bliss and unspoiled contentment were for the simpleminded.
He had revealed the secret passageway off to the side of the life we all led. He’d pulled the curtain on the central fact of existence, which until then I’d failed to comprehend as more than an abstraction: life was optional. From the far end of that passageway he beckoned, mutely suggestive, wrapped in mystery. This was the unmentionable secret at the center of my days in the time since his death: the fact that he was always with me, though dimly remembered and void of substance, like a phantom limb.
So this is what it feels like to have a threesome, she said.
I’ve never known anyone to make a joke about my brother, I said.
I’m not trying to be callous, but don’t you think it’s past time?
Maybe.
And about what your uncle said—
Not tonight. Let it go.
Exactly, she said. Let it go.
I soon became familiar with the long train ride to Charlottesville, the halting, slowly accelerating departure, newspapers and books shielding faces, drinks in the jolly bar car. Strange intimacies with strangers, the proffered stories and the swiveled glances. The endless telephone poles and the scalloped pattern of their lines, rising and falling, rising and falling out the windows. The filthy ditches and the piles of gravel and the scrap-metal heaps. Long lengths of gleaming metal pipes stacked in pyramid form. Featureless glass office towers, low-slung factories abandoned to rot. Brick bungalows and back yard swings. The huge neon sign on the Delaware River Bridge, part boast, part lament: TRENTON MAKES—THE WORLD TAKES.
She must have known that my devotion to our correspondence hinted at larger devotions; yet I wondered how something so powerful could have remained dormant all this time, or if not dormant then at least hidden. She was a mysterious creature, sensuous in the way she moved, self-possessed in the extreme, yet beneath the calm exterior a fierce intelligence burned, a hunger for ideas and language. When I arrived at her apartment the first time, she insisted on reading aloud to me the last eight pages of Don DeLillo’s first novel, Americana, which she’d just finished. Then she ordered me to carry her to the bed. We spent the rest of the afternoon there in the warm yellow light, delicious hours of indulgent pleasure.
How sweet the taste of stolen bread.
The next day, while we made dinner, the phone rang. By the way her face changed when she answered it, I knew it was her boyfriend. He told her he’d received her letter, in which she’d flatly stated their relationship was over. He couldn’t let himself believe it. There must be someone else, he said. She did not answer. In that silence there’s a name, he said. There is someone, isn’t there?
She hung up the phone.
Later, while we were lying next to each other in the dark, she said, It scares me to say this. But I know as long as I live I’m never going to feel about anyone the way I feel about you. I’m never going to find someone who makes me feel so good about myself. I respect you. I respect your need for freedom.
That’s the beauty of this, I said. We respect the other person’s needs. I don’t think we come to this with blinders on. We can have freedom in togetherness.
Guardians of each other’s solitude, she said.
Yes. Guardians of each other’s solitude.
We appeared to agree on everything that mattered. We could have each other. We could have our work. We could have our space in which to think and create and we could do it in nearness to a lover.
I allowed myself to believe we could have it all.
At the end of her spring semester she came to New York for nine days. We went out most nights, drank martinis and smoked expensive cigarettes, ate Vietnamese food in Chinatown, walked through SoHo and the West Village, hopping from bar to bar. She tried to educate me on the poetry criticism she’d been reading, Randall Jarrell and Helen Vendler. I tried to interest her in the novels I’d been reading, The Virgin Suicides and The Pure and the Impure. We confessed our dreams of writing something great, professed our desire to support each other in the work of doing so.
You have an idealized vision of me, she said one night. I can’t possibly live up to it. I think you’ll be disappointed eventually. I’m afraid of that.
I wanted to assure her it wouldn’t happen; if anything, I’d disappoint her. Of course she wasn’t some angel. She wasn’t perfect. But all I knew of her, all I could intuit, intrigued me. Ev
en her moodiness when hungry charmed me. Rather than be wounded by her testy tongue, I was moved to feed her. I wanted to learn the art of taking care, and anyway she mostly took care of herself, and happily. She avoided making me a perpetual human-improvement project. I did her the same courtesy. We each had our flaws—mine were impossible to hide—but we had no urge to modify them in each other. I began with an image of her and wanted only to add understanding and nuance and roll with the punches. I didn’t want her to conform to my image. I wanted her to expand and complicate it. Or so I told myself.
She did so in spades one night when I made some stray comment concerning my notebooks. They were my repository of toxic thoughts and unspeakable dreams, my testing ground for scenes and ideas, my suicide commonplace book, my sanctuary of the mind. Mention of them cast a shadow over her face. It was there suddenly, and just as suddenly it was gone, and I knew the passing shadow meant that she had read them. I said, You didn’t, did you? She twisted her face in shame and said yes. She admitted she’d gone looking for herself, gone looking for my most candid thoughts about her. It was narcissistic, she said. I wanted to know what you had written about me. It was that simple.
Only a few days earlier I had told her it would be over if she ever dared violate my private writings. I’ll throw you out on your ass, I said. That will be it. Finito. Done. My trust would be destroyed.
We were no longer in the realm of the hypothetical. My threat had backfired. Instead of warning her off, I’d fueled her curiosity, made her think there were things worth reading in those mad scribblings.
For everything else she was, aside from a narcissistic snoop—witty, well read, a great beauty, a kind soul, a sporting lover—I decided I should try to forgive her.
So you want to know my secrets? I said.
Is this a trap? she said.
I’ll tell you my secrets. You don’t need to go hunting for them.
I don’t know if I want to hear this.
You can handle it.
You think?
All the Wrong Places: A Life Lost and Found Page 9