He pauses, and it is she who kisses him then, who pulls him down into the slightly dank undergrowth, the soft mosses, who peels their clothes away, like curling apple skins, until they are shivering in the morning woods, until their skin is wet with the remaining dew, until they are shivering with desire, until their skin is wet with touching, burning, rolling and rutting there under the tall trees, under the spreading branches reaching for the growing light.
Cobalt
“Will you make me some tea, dear?”
Kitchen putterings. Kettle whistlings. Pouring just as the water boils, the water that is fresh, filtered. Pouring over the loose tea leaves, swirling them up in the cobalt blue mug, watching them catch the light. Waiting, just staring into the hot water, the tea leaves, not reading the future, just waiting. One minute, two minutes, three and then pouring the tea into a serviceable white mug, straining it carefully, and not a leaf falls through, so carefully is it done. Then poured back again, dark unleafy tea, and one sugar and a little milk and the silver spoon that Patrick found for fifty cents at a city rummage sale and brought home and polished until it shone. And the tea is ready, silver stirring in the deep cobalt blue, and carried over to the table, to the computer humming, whirring, the keys clicking clicking clicking and ah,
reach up,
kiss a thank you,
smile,
and then back to the clicking keys pausing only for long, slow sippings of the hot tea, of the not quite scalding, perfect temperature, perfectly prepared with love and care, dark Ceylon tea.
Rust
Not tonight.
I hurt. You hurt me.
Last night.
Fine, not last night. Two nights ago, then. I still hurt.
Where do you think?
Just leave it alone, dammit!
I don’t want to talk.
I said, I don’t want to talk.
I don’t want to hug, I don’t want to kiss, I definitely don’t want to fuck!
Yeah, sure. I know how your mind works. You were thinking about it.
Don’t even start. I know you.
Look, I’m going to go sleep on the couch.
Fine, you sleep there. Just as long as you let me sleep.
Roses
Can you watch love die? Can you chart its course in the absences? The fewer words spoken. The fewer gentle touches. The shirts unwashed, the dishes undone. The heavy shouting silences. Is it present in the additions? The proliferation of stumbling attempts to make conversation. The sudden passion for sit-ups, for crisp clothes, in the half-formed urges toward self-improvement.
Patrick unlocks their door, fumble-fingered. He walks in, sets down his heavy briefcase, listens for and hears Rosa in the bedroom, chattering. He has time, and so takes his paper-wrapped package into the kitchen. There he pokes and prods, pulls out a few dead leaves, a malformed bud, and shifts until the dark purple roses bloom like bruises from the green heart of ferns. Only then does he take them to her, walks in the bedroom door and sees her there, lying sprawled on their bed with one hand between her thighs, in the dark robe he bought her for their anniversary, the dark silk robe caressing her skin, her hair loose for once and shockingly bright against it, her fingers slipping against the silk, against her skin. She does not see him at first—he slipped off his shoes as he entered, he has learned to move on cat feet. Rosa purrs into the phone for an endless moment, and then looks up, sees him, falls silent. He walks into the room. He offers the flowers. She mouths the words, “Thank you.” She nods towards the kitchen, and he nods in return. Patrick walks out of the room, closing the door behind him, and steps into the kitchen. He pulls down a vase and prepares the fragile blooms for cutting. He carefully does not hear what noises leak through the edges of the door.
Holes
Patrick alone. Patrick alone on the seashore with the sand in his shoes because he will not take them off because that is what she would have done, she would have run barefoot or even naked down the moonlit stretch of sand, she would have dived into the icy water and mocked him for remaining on the shore until he joined her, stripped and ran and dived in, freezing cold and so very happy… .
Patrick crosses the same fifty feet of beach, over and over, with the sand in his shoes and a warm coat buttoned tight and his hands in his pockets. He is warm. He is warm and he does not care. His feet hurt. His fingernails dig into his palms, leaving marks, perhaps even drawing blood, muffled there, deep in his warm pockets.
Patrick remembers. She slept like a cat in the afternoons, curled in the sunlight, naked. He has not slept in the bed since, and the last depression is still there, the pit, the hole where she slept. He remembers the O of her mouth, the shocked opening as he, before he, after he slapped her. Not hard. And she came at him with claws outstretched, she dug into him, she was fierce and pitiless and when she was done he was punctured, pointless. She had shredded him and left nothing but the frame, the stick figure that could only walk, endless on a beach. No room for a heart. Nowhere to put it.
Patrick so very alone.
There are no stars tonight. The sky is dark and empty. The sky is full of black holes, and the stars have fallen through, dying.
Patrick deciding.
Silence and the Word
This is a true story.
In the dark, there’s a woman in bed. Her lover’s hand is between her thighs, and he is rubbing what he thinks is her clit, but in fact he’s almost an inch off, and she doesn’t know what to do. She wants to tell him, somehow, but it’s not an easy thing to communicate. She tries raising her hips a little, hoping that he will figure it out and slide his finger down that crucial inch, but instead he just rubs harder, undoubtedly thinking he is exciting her. She makes little sounds of frustration, but he doesn’t understand what they mean. She knows that she should just say something—even if it’s only “lower,” but the word has gotten caught in her throat; it’s buried down somewhere deep. She can only say it in her head, over and over like a mantra: “lower lower lower lower… . ” She doesn’t know why she’s doing it. It’s not as if he can hear her thoughts, but she wishes he could, because, while it might cause problems, it would be easier than this. Finally, he gives up on getting her off this way and slides his finger inside her instead, gliding over her clit, accidentally, in the process. She gasps, but he thinks it’s because of the finger inside her, and she doesn’t know how to tell him what he’s missing.
That’s me.
At the San Francisco Barnes & Noble store, a woman is reading an erotic short story called “A Jewel of a Woman.” She hasn’t read this story out loud before, and it’s a little more explicit than she remembered. “I once tried that trick you read about, where you stuff a bunch of pearls deep into your pussy and then pull the strand out slowly, one by one. It felt so good, so fucking good as those pearls came out, grinding against my clit one by one… . ” She thinks about dropping her voice a little when she says “pussy” or “fucking” or “clit,” especially since the children’s section is just a few steps away. But the managers must have known what they were letting themselves in for when they scheduled an erotica reading, right? And they gave her a mike anyway. So what the hell! Instead of getting quieter, she gets louder, and sexier; she licks her lips and pauses before the forbidden words; she draws them out— she does her damnedest to seduce the people sitting in the metal folding chairs, seduce them with her voice and swaying body, and by the end of the story people are halted in the aisles across the store, listening, people who hustle away, embarrassed, when she stops. She doesn’t care because she knows that, for a few minutes, she had them. They were hers.
That’s me too.
Forgive the third person—it’s easier than saying “I”. If I had to say “I couldn’t say that” or “I did this,” then I’m not sure I’d be able to write this at all. But maybe I could—that’s what’s so odd. It’s a lot easier to write this stuff down than to say it out loud. I’ve been writing erotica for seven years now, and it st
ill surprises me how easy it is to write, “She wanted to fuck him silly, until his eyes were bugging out… . ” or even “I took his thick cock in my mouth, licking it up and down… .“
Maybe it’s because erotica is fiction. That would be one explanation—that even though there’s a little of myself in all my characters (even the gay men), it’s never quite me. My characters can often say and do things that would terrify me in real life; I can use them to explore all sorts of possibilities. They can have sex with strangers, or with their best friends. They can be blindfolded and beaten. They can do desperate, crazy things for love, or for a really good fuck. They’re just characters.
Even when I’m reading my stories out loud, my audience doesn’t know which ones, which parts are really me. Even if I tell them, “This one is autobiographical,” they can’t really know where autobiography ends and fiction begins.
It’s different at night, in the dark, in bed.
He is kissing her, her cheeks, her neck, her throat. It feels good, but something is bothering her, something is making her more quiet than usual, not as responsive. He notices. He stops and asks, “What’s wrong?” She shakes her head. She wants to answer, to ask for something, a small thing, but she can’t. She is afraid of the words, and doesn’t know why. She is afraid of his answer to her simple request. She is a little reluctant to say anything at first. Then her silence makes this seem more important than it should be, and it becomes even more difficult to talk, to say the words. She feels paralyzed. He has dealt with this before. Silence, and the stillness of her body that signals distress. They have sometimes played twenty questions—him asking the questions, trying to guess what is bothering her. She can manage to nod or shake her head, but, too often, he can’t even come close to asking the right questions. Tonight, though, he has a new idea. He gets up, walks naked to the living room, gets a pencil and paper and brings them back. Turns on the nightstand light, hands her the paper and pencil, turns away while she scribbles a few sentences on the paper. She feels ridiculous, and almost doesn’t have the nerve to give him the paper, but she does. She buries her face in his chest while he reads her request. He doesn’t laugh. He reaches out, shuts off the light, turns back and tilts up her head and starts to kiss her again. This time, on her lips. He kisses her for a long time. He doesn’t say anything, and she is grateful.
See—it’s not just that fiction is easier to write than nonfiction. Writing it down is easier than speaking it. The writing lets me distance myself. The hand moving across the page is further away from the heart of me than the air in my throat, struggling to form words. If you read this, and then we meet some day, you will know these things about me, these things that I have written, that I have told you. Probably I’ll be embarrassed, but it will be an embarrassment I can live with. It will be so much easier than having said the words out loud.
She feels so silly having him get a pencil and paper that she tries to teach him the sign alphabet. It is all she knows of sign language—the shapes of letters, A, B, C—but it is enough to make small sentences, with patience. In bed, in the moonlight, she can spell out: W I L L Y O U G O D O W N O N M E? She usually doesn’t even have to spell out the whole thing; he figures it out around the D and takes her hand in his to still it and then smiles and slides his mouth down her body. What is funniest is that sometimes he forgets what letter a shape means, especially when she hasn’t done this for him in a while. Then she ends up sounding out half the letters as she says them, so that she feels like a grownup talking over the head of a little kid, spelling out the letters of words she doesn’t want her to hear. It’s silly, it’s ridiculous—but it’s working. It’s better than pencil and paper. It’s much better than nothing.
My lovers are always startled when they realize how much trouble I have talking in bed. They’re mostly quiet themselves—I like the quiet types, and so lovemaking tends not to be too talkative. For most things, body language and muffled sounds do well enough. Sometimes we go weeks before they figure it out. When they do, they almost always say the same thing—”But you write this stuff!”
“It’s not the same,” I explain. After a while, they believe me, especially after they see me trying, and failing, to talk. Sometimes they accept it as yet another of my strange quirks. One or two have really wanted to know why. I’ve gotten frustrated enough with the whole business that I’ve tried to figure it out too.
The nearest I can come to figuring it out is that it has to do with being naked. Not just physically naked, though that’s part of it (I have no problems talking about sex while sitting on the couch, fully clothed, using sufficiently dry and clinical terms).
When I talk about sex in bed with a lover, I am physically and emotionally naked, open and vulnerable to someone whom I am inviting past the barriers, the boundaries, someone who has seen and touched all my private spaces. It’s intense, and scary. To put my real desires, my most intimate thoughts, into words, and to say them out loud in a private space where there is no possibility that I can pretend that I was just joking, reciting, performing—that’s just plain terrifying. It’s the most naked act I know.
It’s a lot easier to run away and hide.
She has been with him for years. She knows how to translate his code words; speech doesn’t always come easily to him either. So when he finishes, and asks her, “Are you okay?” she knows that he is really asking if she is satisfied, if that was enough, or if she’d like him to do something else. He is even trying to make it easy for her—all she has to say is, “No,” and he will try to satisfy her. Sometimes when she needs to, she manages to say it, but this time, the thought of the conversation they might get into (as he tries to find out exactly what she wants) exhausts her. So she says “I’m fine,” and pretends to herself that she’s answering another question entirely, because while she’s not really satisfied, not sated, she’s not really thrumming with tension either—she’s okay, she’s fine. It’s true enough, isn’t it?
You see, I was raised to be polite. I’m not someone who swears easily—it takes a real crisis to get “fuck!” or even “dammit!” out of my mouth. When upset, I am more likely to cry or be silent than shout. Being polite means not saying things, a lot of the time. Not saying things that might upset someone else, things that might make someone uncomfortable. I can hide my powerful naked emotions behind a sheltering, softening cloak of politeness; and that’s how I was raised—that’s how most of us are raised. That’s how you get along with people.
If I ask a lover for something, and he doesn’t really want to give it to me, we are both in an awkward position. Does he refuse, and deal with my disappointment? Does he agree, and do something he doesn’t really want to do? If he thinks my request is ridiculous, or disgusting, won’t we both just be embarrassed? It’s easier not to ask.
Yet I’m not sure that silence is ever a real solution. It’s just easier than speaking. But in the end, I don’t want to just be “polite” with my lover.
She has bought a copy of Exhibitionism for the Shy, though she has always distrusted self-help books. She is on the first exercise, where you stand alone in a room and say the forbidden words out loud. Just the words at first, disassociated.
Fuck. Cock. Pussy. Cunt.
Once she has practiced that for a while (it’s not so hard), she moves to the next step—owning the words.
My pussy. My cunt.
I like fucking.
This part is difficult. She almost gives up right here. But she is tired of not being able to say what she wants to say. She is tired of resorting to pieces of paper and letters hand-spelled out in dim light. It would be so much better to just be able to say it. She feels silly, stupid, ridiculous all over again, saying these words to an empty room—but she says them. It does get easier with practice.
I want you to lick me.
I want you to fuck my pussy, my cunt.
So why are those words so particularly difficult? There are lots of things I could ask for, lots of things that a
lover might say no to, that might be upsetting or disappointing—yet they’re rarely as difficult to say as “Will you kiss my breasts?” (Try it. Go alone into the bathroom; close the door, and try saying the words out loud. I hope you have an easier time of it than I do.)
Is it because we’re not supposed to like sex? Is that a spectre of my mother, hovering in the background, listening as I say those scary words? Am I hearing the echoes of all those years of “don’t look, don’t touch, don’t do… .“ Whether said or unsaid, the message was clear; just don’t. So that if I do, I do it quietly in secret, in the dark, under the covers, soundlessly. Or, if overcome by passion, I might scream, and there’s an excuse, isn’t there? “I couldn’t help myself… . ” So whimpering and moaning might be okay; that’s just my body taking over.
Silence and the Word Page 3